A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  He spent his time in the water making elaborate plans for his trip to the coast of northern California that evening. Bernadette would have looked at him differently if she could have known his true strength—in a few hours he was going to wear out three film stars one after the other.

  At teatime Bernadette made a point of helping the women serve the food. Adrian stayed where his mother had told him to wait with the other children. When Bernadette came near him he pulled his shoulders back and drew himself up to his full height. He wanted her to realise he was taller and more powerfully built than she was. But she kept her eyes lowered and he had to sit down and cross his legs in case she noticed the insignificant wrinkle in the front of his bathing trunks.

  While his cousin served the food she had to stand very close to Adrian. Two or three times she leaned across him so that her breasts were almost under his nose. Adrian thought he might as well glance at her body. Perhaps some detail of it would come in handy in America when he couldn’t visualise one of his film stars as accurately as he needed.

  Adrian pretended to be busy with his bread and butter and hard-boiled egg while he inspected Bernadette at close range. It was the nearest he had ever been to a full-grown Australian female body in a bathing suit, but he was far from impressed.

  The skin between her throat and breasts had been burnt a little by the sun. It was a raw flesh-pink colour instead of the uniform golden-cream he preferred in a beautiful woman. There was even a small brown mole on the very slope where one of her breasts began, which automatically disqualified her from perfection.

  Whenever she walked, her thighs and calves turned out to be full of muscles. Even the slightest movement made one or other of the muscles tense or slacken. It was impossible for Adrian to tell whether the legs were shapely because she never once kept them in an artistic pose.

  He risked a quick glance between her legs and saw something that shocked him. When she passed close by him again he looked a second time. He was not mistaken. High up inside her leg where the white of her thigh met the tartan fabric of her bathers, a single dark-brown hair, perhaps an inch long, lay curled against her skin.

  He could not tell whether the hair had sprouted from the thigh itself or whether he was looking at the end of it only, and its roots were somewhere in the mysterious territory beneath her bathers. But it didn’t really matter. Either way, the coarse coiled hair made nonsense of any claim she had to beauty. He could call to mind a whole gallery of beautiful legs. They were all motionless and symmetrical and as smooth as the finest marble.

  After tea Adrian had to go back to the changing shed to put his clothes on. On the way to the shed he tried to remind himself of the trip to Big Sur that would make up for his miserable day at Mordialloc. But all his staring at his cousin had made him restless and tense. He thought he would probably never make it to California.

  In the changing shed he gave in quickly. He locked himself in one of the toilet cubicles and set to work. He did not even close his eyes—he was in Mordialloc, beside Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, Australia, all the while. But he resisted with all his strength the images of blemished skin and bunched calf muscles and hairy thighs that urged themselves on him. He would not betray all the beauty of America for the sake of his lumpish cousin.

  He looked all round him, staring at the walls in the twilight. Something white caught his eye. Of all the women he knew, in America and Australia, only Miss Kathleen Mahoney was with him at the end. He leaned his head against the soothing shapes of the letters of her name.

  One morning late in the year Brother Cyprian announced to the class, ‘After your exams we’ll be having a Father Dreyfus at the school one night to show a film and give a talk and answer any of your questions on the subject of sex education.’

  The brother read from a paper on his desk: ‘The film has been shown to Catholic boys in secondary forms all over Australia. It shows in a perfectly clear and simple fashion all those matters which boys are often anxious to know but unfortunately are sometimes unwilling to find out from parents and teachers.

  ‘The film offers the whole wonderful story of human reproduction from the moment of fertilisation to the hour of birth and illustrates clearly the workings of the human body both male and female.’

  Brother Cyprian looked over the boys’ heads at the back wall and said, ‘All boys are urged to come to this film but of course there’s no compulsion. Father Dreyfus is a man worth coming miles to hear on any subject. He’s led an extraordinary life. He was in a Nazi concentration camp during the war. He rides a motorbike. He’s what you might call a man’s man.’

  Adrian Sherd thought this was the best news he had heard all year. He tried to catch the eye of Cornthwaite or Seskis or O’Mullane to share his excitement. But they were all staring ahead as though there was nothing they needed to learn from any travelling priest and his famous film.

  Adrian remembered the brother’s words, ‘from the moment of fertilisation’. He was going to see the most daring film ever made. At the very least he expected a statue or a painting of a man and woman doing it—a famous work of art that had been kept out of sight for centuries in some gallery in Europe. Yet if such a statue or painting existed it would have been the work of a pagan artist, and this was to be a Catholic film.

  Perhaps he would see a married couple making a lump under the blankets of their bed. But Brother Cyprian had said, ‘a perfectly clear and simple fashion’. The blankets would have to be thrown back to show the organs at work. The couple, of course, would be hooded or masked to protect them from embarrassment.

  But surely this was too much to hope for. No film in all history had ever shown the act itself. Anyone, even a priest, would be arrested just for having it in his possession, let alone showing it to an audience. Adrian could only wait and count the days until he actually saw the film.

  On the night of the film every boy in the class turned up. When Brother Cyprian blew his whistle to call them inside, they loitered and went on talking as though they weren’t at all anxious to see whatever the priest had to show.

  Father Dreyfus had a thick black beard—an unheard-of thing for a priest. He was sitting on top of the front desk with his hands in his pockets and his legs crossed. On all the other desks there were pencils and pieces of paper. The priest invited the boys to write down any questions they had about sex and marriage and said he would try to answer them before he showed his film.

  Not many boys wrote down questions. Adrian tried to think of something to oblige the priest but he heard a familiar cough from the back of the room and remembered that Brother Cyprian was somewhere behind him in the shadows fiddling with the projector. If the brother saw him writing out a question he might think Adrian was preoccupied with sexual matters.

  The priest read out the questions from the slips of paper and answered each one briefly. Most of the questions seemed childish to Adrian. He could have answered them himself with all the information he had got from Cornthwaite and his friends during the past two years.

  There was only one really interesting question. Someone had asked what advice he ought to give to his best friend who hadn’t been to confession for nearly a year because he was too scared to confess all the sins of impurity he committed by himself.

  This was the first time that Adrian had ever heard the sin of self-abuse discussed in public. Priests and brothers often made vague references to it, but no one had ever mentioned it so boldly as the anonymous author of the question.

  Adrian didn’t hear the first part of the priest’s answer. He was too busy trying to work out who had asked the question. The story about the best friend sounded unlikely. The questioner himself was the fellow who had a year’s worth of sins on his soul.

  All over the room, other boys were puzzling over the same matter. Adrian studied the faint turnings of heads and the surreptitious glances. Suspicion seemed to fall on Noonan, a big dull fellow. Adrian remembered Noonan getting up from his seat outside the confessional one
First Thursday and leaving the church as though he wanted to be sick. It was a good trick. He could have practised it month after month while his total of sins mounted up.

  After answering Noonan’s question the priest said, ‘Only the other day I was reading an American book on psychology. Young people and their problems. That sort of thing. I was very surprised to see some figures relating to the sin we’re talking about. According to the book, over ninety per cent of boys have experimented with masturbation before they’re eighteen years old. Of course these figures wouldn’t apply to Catholic boys but it certainly makes you stop and think.’

  After he had got over the shock of hearing the word ‘masturbation’ spoken by a priest (and in his own classroom), Adrian wondered what the figures implied. Perhaps he and Cornthwaite and the others wouldn’t have felt so unusual if they had been lucky enough to grow up in America. Ninety per cent seemed a high figure at first, but of course American boys were subject to much fiercer temptations than Australians. Many of them had probably seen in the flesh the women that Adrian only saw in pictures.

  When the priest had answered all their questions he told a boy to turn out the lights. Then he said to Brother Cyprian, ‘Let her roll,’ and the projector started.

  It was an old, worn film. The sound crackled and boomed, and every few minutes a cloud of grey blobs and streaks fell across the screen like a sudden squall of rain. An overgrown child with long trousers and a bowtie was asking his parents how he had come into the world. The people were all Americans. It was obvious from the way they smiled and patted each other and held themselves stiffly that they weren’t even proper actors. They belonged to the mysterious multitude that Adrian had never seen in films—the Catholic American families who lived in a pagan land but still kept up the struggle to save their souls.

  A few more diagrams appeared. It rained hard all over the screen again. Adrian prayed for the rain to clear before the female organs and the moment of fertilisation came on the screen.

  The rain died down, and she stood before them at last. Only it wasn’t really a she. Adrian almost groaned aloud. The swindlers had made a sort of dressmaker’s dummy and sliced it off just above the navel. The thing swung round noiselessly on a swivel to show its genital organs. Adrian half-expected it to topple forward like the corpses in films that were propped up in chairs until someone turned them round to see why they wouldn’t talk.

  The female thing stayed on the screen for perhaps ten seconds. Even while he was straining to fix it in his mind forever, Adrian was aware that all of the fifty and more heads around him were suddenly motionless—all except one. Just behind Adrian, at the back of the room, Brother Cyprian jerked his head around and stared into a dark corner when the thighs and belly started turning towards him. Adrian understood—the brother was under a vow of chastity, and for him the thing on the screen was an occasion of sin.

  Between its legs the creature had a low bald mound with a suggestion of a cleft or fissure along its middle. Adrian cursed the people who made the dummy or statue or whatever it was for putting the mound or whatever it was so far down between the legs that its finer details were hidden. He was trying to imagine how the legs and the object between them would look walking towards him or stepping out of a bathing suit or lying down in an attitude of surrender, when they faded from the screen.

  A huge diagram appeared. Adrian knew it like the back of his hand. It was the female reproductive system. He hardly bothered to listen while the commentator’s voice explained what happened in the ovaries and oviducts and Fallopian tubes. Over the years he had found many sketches and diagrams and charts and sectional reliefs of the inside of a female body—but not one lifelike illustration of the outside.

  He was trying to imagine the whole diagram enclosed in skin and packed away between two thighs, when he noticed something odd in the lowest part of the screen. A swarm of bees or a flight of tiny arrows was drifting through the lowest tube. It could even have been the grey rain in the film suddenly reversing and going back up the screen. But then the commentator announced what was really happening.

  They were watching the moment of fertilisation. This was what Adrian and all his class had come from miles around to see. But it was nothing like real life. An army of little sperm-men was invading the diagram. The commentator got excited. He thought there was nothing so marvellous as the long journey of these tiny creatures. Adrian didn’t care what happened to the little bastards now that the film had turned out to be a fraud.

  The sperm cells were thinning out and growing weaker. The boys of Form Four at St Carthage’s were still staring at the screen. They didn’t seem to realise they had been cheated. Adrian stretched himself in his seat and wondered how the scene had been filmed.

  Was it just an animated diagram like a cartoon? Or did the filmmakers pay some lunatic to shoot his stuff into a hollow tube inside the dressmaker’s dummy? Or did they put a tiny camera inside a female organ so that Adrian and his class and even Father Dreyfus and Brother Cyprian were all sitting in the dark inside a woman’s body while some huge fellow outside was doing her for all he was worth but none of them knew what was going on?

  One day in December Stan Seskis told his friends he had read somewhere that a normal man should be able to have relations with a woman once every twenty-four hours unless he was ill or abnormal or something. Seskis said he had proved the truth of this by doing it to himself for ten nights on end and he was glad to know he was as good as any normal man.

  Adrian Sherd had always been content to visit America three or four times a week. When he had tried it more frequently, his female companions always seemed listless and uncooperative and even the landscape was uninspiring. But he had to see whether Seskis was talking sense.

  He reached a score of five consecutive nights. On the sixth night it was like torture. He arrived at a desert playground in Arizona. He was so jaded that he had brought two carloads of women with him instead of his usual two or three favourites. Jayne, Marilyn, Kim, Susan, Debbi, Zsa-Zsa—anyone who might come in useful was there.

  He had to order them around like an army sergeant. He told one squad to strip off at once. A second squad had to take their clothes off slowly, dawdling over each item. Another group had to hide among the rocks and be ready to give in to him if he stumbled on them during the afternoon.

  The fun and games dragged on for hours. The women began to complain. Sherd tried to think of some mad perversion that would bring everything to an end. The thing that finally did the trick was so absurd that he almost apologised to the women when it was over. He told them he didn’t want to see any of them for at least a week. Then he flung himself down in the shade of a giant cactus and fell asleep.

  The next day was Sunday. Adrian rode his bike to seven o’clock mass instead of going with his family on the nine o’clock mass bus. He told his parents he preferred the early mass because it left him the rest of the day for mucking around. But in fact he was tired of staying in his seat while his parents and brothers looked curiously at him as they climbed past his knees on their way to communion. He thought his father would surely guess soon which sin it was that kept him away from communion for weeks on end.

  It was the Third Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday before school broke up for the long summer holidays. Inside the church, Adrian joined his hands and bowed his head slightly and looked at the people around him. He knew it was no use trying to pray unless he had some intention of giving up his sin in future.

  The sermon was about repentance in preparation for the great feast of Christmas. The priest said, ‘This is the season when we ought to remember all the ways we’ve offended Our Blessed Saviour during the past year.’

  Some of the people near Adrian lowered their eyes and tried to look sorry for their sins. Adrian wished he could shout, ‘Hypocrites!’ in their faces. What did they know about sins? God saw into their hearts. He knew the year’s total of mortal sins for everyone in the church. According to the records kept in hea
ven, the worst sinner, by a margin of at least a hundred, was a young man in the back row. He was pale and weary, as well he might be. Young and slightly built though he was, he had outscored people twice his age. More remarkable still, he had restricted himself to breaking one commandment, whereas they had the whole ten to choose from.

  At communion time Adrian sat up to let the sinless ones past. A young woman’s stocking brushed against his knee. The taut golden fabric shrank back from the drab grey of his school trousers. Adrian kept his eyes down. The champion sinner of Our Lady of Good Counsel’s parish for 1953 was not worthy to set eyes on a pure young woman approaching the communion rail.

  While the long queues of communicants moved slowly towards the altar, Adrian opened his missal at the page headed ‘Making a Spiritual Communion’ and tried to look as if he was making one. If a person was not in a state of sin, but could not go to communion because he had eaten a meal or drunk a glass of water that morning, that person could unite himself in spirit with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. If the owner of the golden stockings noticed Adrian when she returned to her seat, she would probably see the heading on the page of his missal and think he hadn’t gone to communion because of a mouthful of water he swallowed while he was cleaning his teeth that morning.

  The owner of the stockings turned out to be a girl in a school uniform. The skirt and tunic were a rich beige colour. On the tunic pocket was a snow-covered mountain peak against a bright blue sky. A circle of gold stars and a gold motto hung in the sky. It was the uniform of the Academy of Mount Carmel, in the suburb of Richmond. The girl seemed no older than Adrian, although he knew already that her legs were heavy and rounded like a woman’s.

  Coming back from communion, the girl kept her eyes lowered. Her lashes were long and dark. She must have felt Adrian staring at her as she settled herself in her seat. She looked at him for less than a second. Then she knelt down and covered her face with her hands like all good Catholics after communion.