A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  Di Nuzzo said, ‘I’ll never go to any other priest again until I’m married. You just tell him your monthly total and he sighs a bit and gives you your penance.’

  Adrian envied Di Nuzzo until the day when the priest was transferred to another parish. On the first Saturday of every month Di Nuzzo had to ride his bike nearly five miles to East St Kilda just to have an easy confession. Two years later, when Di Nuzzo had left school, Adrian saw him one Saturday morning in the city waiting for a West Coburg tram.

  Di Nuzzo grinned and said, ‘It had to happen. They’ve posted him to a new parish on the far side of Melbourne. I have to take a bus for two miles from the tram terminus. But I’m saving up to buy a motorbike.’

  On the first Thursday of every month, when he came out of the confessional, Adrian knelt in front of Our Lady’s altar and prayed for the gift of Holy Purity. Then he said a special prayer of thanksgiving to God for preserving his life during the past month while his soul had been in a state of mortal sin. (If he had died suddenly during that time he would have spent eternity in hell.)

  For most of that day he told himself he had finished with impurity. He even kept away from Cornthwaite and his friends in the school ground. But when he arrived home he saw his model railroad leaning against the wall in the shed. He whispered the names of landscapes he had still not explored—Great Smoky Mountains, Sun Valley, Grand Rapids—and he knew he would soon go back to America.

  But he was not free to go back yet. On the following Sunday morning he would be at mass with his family. His parents would know that he had been to confession on the Thursday. They would expect him to go to communion with them. If he did not go, they would know for certain that some time between Thursday and Sunday he had committed a mortal sin. His father would start asking questions. If Mr Sherd even suspected the truth about the American journey, Adrian would die of shame or run away from home.

  For the sake of his future, Adrian had to avoid mortal sin from Thursday until Sunday morning. And it was not enough just to stay away from America. Any impure thought, if he wilfully entertained it, was a mortal sin. Such thoughts could appear in his mind at any hour of the day or night. It would be a desperate struggle.

  The Thursday night was the easiest. Adrian needed a rest. The last few nights before his monthly confession usually wore him out. On those nights he knew he would not be visiting America again for some time, and he tried to enjoy every minute in the country as though it was his last.

  On Friday at school he kept away again from Cornthwaite and the others. For as long as Adrian was in the state of grace, his former friends were what the church called bad companions.

  On Friday night he did all his weekend homework and stayed up as late as possible to tire himself. In bed he remembered the advice a priest had once given him in confession: ‘Take your pleasure from good and holy things.’

  He closed his eyes and thought of good and holy landscapes. He saw the vineyards on the hills of Italy, where ninety-nine per cent of the people were Catholics. He crossed the golden plateaus of Spain, the only country in the world where the Communists had been fought and beaten to a standstill. The whole of Latin America was safe to explore, but he usually fell asleep before he reached there.

  On Saturday morning he read the sporting section of the Argus but was careful not to open the other pages. They were sure to have some picture that would torment him all day.

  After lunch he went for a ride on his father’s old bike to tire himself out. He chose a route with plenty of hills and made sure he would have to ride the last few miles into the wind. On the steepest climbs, when he could hardly keep the pedals moving, he hissed to the rhythm of his straining thighs, ‘Chastise the body. Chastise the body.’

  There were still temptations even in the bleakest suburbs. Sometimes he saw the backs of a woman’s thighs as she bent forward in her garden, or the shapes of her breasts bouncing under her sweater as she pushed a mower. When this happened he slowed down and waited for a glimpse of the woman’s face. It was nearly always so plain that he was glad to forget all about her.

  He came home exhausted and had a shower before tea. (On other Saturdays he had a bath late at night. He lay back with his organ submerged and thought foul thoughts to make it break the surface like the periscope of a submarine.) The taps in the shower recess were so hard to regulate that he had no time to stand still. He came out shivering with cold. His organ was a wrinkled stub. He flicked the towel at it and whispered, ‘Bring the body into subjection.’

  After tea he listened to the London Stores Show on the wireless to hear the football results. Then he played a game of football he had invented. He arranged thirty-six coloured scraps of paper on the table for men and threw dice to decide the path of the ball. He played the game until nearly midnight. Then he went to bed and thought about football until he fell asleep.

  On Sunday morning the Sherd family caught the bus to nine o’clock mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel’s, Accrington. The people in the bus were nearly always the same from week to week. They even sat in the same seats. A young woman sat opposite the Sherds. Most Sundays Adrian took no notice of her. She had a pasty face and a dumpy figure. But on the first Sunday of each month the sight of her legs gave him no peace.

  Adrian believed in the devil. It could only have been the devil who arranged for a pair of legs to lie in wait for him on the first Sunday of the month when he was within an hour of reaching the altar rails without sinning. To defeat this last temptation he recited over and over to himself from the Prayers after Mass, ‘Thrust Satan down into hell and with him the other wicked spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.’

  He never looked at the legs for more than a second at a time. And he never looked anywhere near them when his parents or the young woman’s parents or the woman herself or any other passenger might have caught him at it. Sometimes he only saw the legs once or twice on the whole trip. But he knew by heart every curve and undulation on them, the freckles on the lower parts of the kneecaps, the mole on one shin, the tension of the stockings over the ankle bones.

  The legs talked to him. They whispered that he still had to wait more than an hour until he was safe at the altar rails. They urged him to close his eyes during the sermon and visualise them in all their naked beauty and wilfully consent to enjoy the pleasure he got.

  When he still resisted them they became more shameless. They kicked their heels high like dancers in an American musical. They even bared the first few inches of their thighs and reminded him that there was much more to see farther up in the shadows under their skirt. Or if he did not fancy them, they said, would he prefer some of the legs he would see during mass? The church would be full of legs. He would only have to drop his missal on the floor and bend his head down to retrieve it and there, under the seat in front of him, would be calves and ankles of all shapes to feast on.

  Adrian never surrendered to the legs. Instead he made a pact with them. He promised that on that very Sunday night he would meet them in America and do whatever they asked of him. In return they were to leave him in peace until he had been to communion. The legs were always as good as their word. As soon as the pact was made they stopped bothering him and stroked and preened themselves discreetly out of his view.

  During mass Adrian relaxed for the first time in days. He went to communion with his head high. On the bus trip home the legs caused no trouble. He found he could last for several minutes without looking at them. But before he left the bus he always nodded casually to them as a sign that he would observe the pact.

  Only once had Adrian tried to break the terms of his agreement. He had made an unusually devout communion and on the bus after mass he was thinking what a pity it was that his soul would be soiled again so soon. He began to pray for the strength to resist the legs in future.

  Across the narrow aisle of the bus the legs drew themselves up into a fighting posture. They warned him they would come to his bed that night and tempt
him as he had never been tempted before. They would strip themselves and perform such tricks in front of his eyes that he would never sleep again until he had yielded to them.

  Adrian knew they could do it. Already their anger had made them more attractive than ever. He apologised to them and hoped he hadn’t made too big a fool of himself in front of them.

  Whenever Adrian’s friends started talking about sex, he had to use his wits to keep them from guessing his most embarrassing secret. This secret bothered him every day of his life. He was sure no other young man in Melbourne had such an absurd thing to hide.

  Adrian didn’t like to put his secret into simple words—it humiliated him so much. But it was simple nevertheless: he had never seen the external genital apparatus of a human female.

  When Adrian was nine years old and a pupil of St Margaret Mary’s School in a western suburb of Melbourne, some of the boys in his grade formed a secret society. They met among the oleanders in a little park near the school. Their aim was to persuade girls to visit the park and pull down their pants in full view of the society.

  Adrian applied many times to join this society and was eventually admitted on probation. On the afternoon of his first meeting, the society was expecting six or seven girls but only two turned up. One of them refused even to lift her skirt—even after the boys of the society had all offered to take out their cocks and give her a good look. The other girl (Dorothy McEncroe—Adrian would always remember her, although she was a scrawny little thing) tucked her school tunic under her chin and lowered her pants for perhaps five seconds.

  As a probationary member of the society Adrian had been forced to stand at the back of the little group of boys. At the very moment, when McEncroe’s pants were sliding down the last few inches of her belly, the boys in front of Adrian began to jostle each other for a better view. Adrian clawed at them like a madman. He was small and light for his age and he could not shift them. He got down on his hands and knees and wriggled between their legs. He pushed his head into the inner circle just as the dark-blue pleats of the uniform of St Margaret Mary’s School fell back into place over Dorothy McEncroe’s thighs.

  Adrian never had a second chance to inspect Dorothy McEncroe or any other girl at that school. A few days after the meeting, the parish priest visited all the upper grades to warn them against loitering in the park after school. The secret society was disbanded and Dorothy McEncroe walked home every night with a group of girls and pulled faces at any boy who tried to talk to her.

  As he grew older, Adrian tried other ways of learning about women and girls.

  One wet afternoon at St Margaret Mary’s the children in Grade Seven were allowed to do free reading from the library—a glass-fronted cupboard in the corner. Adrian took down a volume of the encyclopedia from the top shelf. The book seemed mostly about art and sculpture, and many of the pictures and statues were naked. Adrian turned the pages rapidly. There were cocks and balls and breasts everywhere. He was sure he would find what he wanted among all that bare skin. His knees began to tremble. It was the afternoon under the oleanders again. But this time there was no one to block his view, and the woman he was about to see would have no pants or tunic within reach.

  The girl behind him (Clare Buckley—he had cursed her a thousand times since) jumped to her feet.

  ‘Please, Sister. Adrian Sherd’s trying to read that book you told us not to borrow from the top shelf.’

  The room was suddenly silent. Adrian heard the whistling of the nun’s robes. She was beside him before he could even close the book. But she spared him.

  ‘There is nothing either good or bad in art,’ she said to the class. ‘Adrian must have been away when I told you all not to bother yourselves about this book. We’ll put it away for safekeeping just the same.’

  She carried the book back to her own desk. Adrian never saw it again in the library.

  In later years Adrian sometimes came across other books about art with pictures of naked men and women. But whereas the men had neat little balls and stubby uncircumcised cocks resting comfortably and unashamed between their legs, the women had nothing but smooth skin or marble fading away into the shadows where their thighs met. Adrian suspected a conspiracy among artists and sculptors to preserve the secrets of women from boys like himself.

  He thought how unfair it was that girls could learn all about men from pictures and statues while boys could search for years in libraries or art galleries and still be ignorant about women. He almost wept for the injustice of it.

  In his first months at St Carthage’s College, Adrian learned a little more from an unexpected source. Every Wednesday the boys went for sport to some playing fields near the East Swindon tram terminus. Under the changing rooms was a lavatory with its walls covered in scribble. Some of the messages and stories were illustrated. Even here, most of the pictures were of men’s and boys’ organs, but Adrian sometimes found a sketch of a naked female.

  From these crude drawings he pieced together an image of something that was oval in shape and bisected by a vertical line. He practised drawing this shape until it came easily to him, but he found it impossible to imagine such an odd thing between two smooth graceful thighs.

  When Adrian first joined the little group around Cornthwaite, Seskis and O’Mullane, he listened to the names they used for the thing he was looking for. Cunt, twat, hole, ring, snatch, crack—when he heard these words he nodded or smiled like someone who had used them familiarly all his life. But long afterwards he brooded over them, hoping they might yield a clear image of the thing they named.

  Adrian’s friends knew there were certain magazines full of information and pictures about sex. They knew the names of some of them—Man, Man Junior, Men Only, Lilliput and Health and Sunshine. They believed that non-Catholic newsagents kept the magazines hidden under their counters or in back rooms.

  Cornthwaite often boasted that he could get any of the filthy magazines. All he had to do was ask a big bastard in his parish tennis club to walk into his local newsagent and ask for one. Adrian begged him to buy a Health and Sunshine. He had heard this was the one with the most daring pictures. They were rumoured to show everything. But Cornthwaite never remembered to get him one.

  One afternoon in a barber’s shop in Swindon Road, Adrian found a Man Junior among the magazines lying about for customers to read. He was desperate to see inside it, but he was wearing his school uniform and he couldn’t bring St Carthage’s into disrepute by reading a smutty magazine in public.

  He kept his eyes on the barber and his assistant and moved along the seat until he was sitting on the Man Junior. Then he bent forward and slipped the magazine down behind his legs and into his Gladstone bag. It was the first time he had ever stolen something of value, but he was sure the magazine was worth less than the amount necessary to make the theft a mortal sin.

  Adrian looked through his Man Junior in one of the cubicles in the toilet on Swindon railway station. He saw plenty of naked women, but every one of them had something (a beach ball, a bucket and spade, a fluffy dog, a trailing vine, a leopard’s skin or simply her own upraised leg) concealing the place he had waited so long to see. It all looked so casual—as though the big ball had just bounced past, or the dog had happened to stroll up and greet the woman an instant before the camera clicked. But Adrian was sure it was done deliberately. The smiles of the women angered him. They pretended to be brazen temptresses, but at the last moment they draped fronds of greenery across themselves or hid behind their pet dogs.

  It was not safe to take the whole magazine home. Adrian tore out the three most attractive pictures and hid them in the lining of his bag. That evening he searched through his brother’s Boys’ Wonder Book. He had remembered an article entitled ‘An Easy-to-make Periscope’. He found the article and made a note of the materials needed for the periscope.

  Next day at school he talked to a boy who was crazy about science. Adrian said he had just thought up a brilliant idea to help the America
ns spy on the Russians but he wanted to be sure it would work. The idea was to take pictures of the walls around the Kremlin or any other place the Americans wanted to see into. Then American scientists could aim powerful periscopes at the photographs to see what was behind the walls.

  The boy told Adrian it was the stupidest idea he had ever heard. He started to explain something about light rays but Adrian told him not to bother. Adrian was glad he hadn’t hinted at what he really wanted to do with a periscope.

  Adrian gave his three Man Junior pictures to Ullathorne, who collected bare-breasted women. He handed over the pictures in a back lane in Swindon, well away from St Carthage’s. It was well known that a boy had been expelled from the college after a brother had found dirty magazines in his bag.

  One Friday, a few weeks later, Cornthwaite told Adrian that if he liked to turn up at Caulfield Racecourse on the following Sunday, he might meet a certain fellow from Cornthwaite’s parish who often sold second-hand copies of his big brother’s dirty magazines.

  Adrian said he would only come if the fellow was likely to have some copies of Health and Sunshine. It was too far to ride his bike five miles to Caulfield just to buy Man or Man Junior.

  Cornthwaite said the fellow could sell you any magazine you liked to name.

  Sunday afternoon was cold and windy but Adrian didn’t want to miss the chance to get Health and Sunshine. He had the wind in his face all the way to Caulfield, and the trip took longer than he had expected.

  The racecourse was a favourite meeting place for the boys from Cornthwaite’s suburb. Adrian found Cornthwaite and a few others racing on their bikes in and out among the bookmakers’ stands in the deserted betting ring. Cornthwaite said the fellow with the magazines had sold out and gone home long before. He offered Adrian a few pages torn from a magazine and said, ‘I bought a Health and Sunshine myself. But then Laurie D’Arcy turned up and I sold it to him for a profit. But I saved you the best picture from it.’