A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  Adrian’s uncle, Mr McAloon, met them at Colac station. Adrian left a space for his young wife in the back seat of his uncle’s car. He watched her face closely all the way and enjoyed the surprises she got. She had no idea that Colac was such a busy town. She had never seen such green paddocks and rich red soil as she found on the farms near Orford. And she thought the view of rolling plains from the McAloons’ house was nearly as exciting as all the mountain scenery in Tasmania (and gave Adrian’s hand a squeeze when she mentioned the place where they had spent their honeymoon).

  Two of Adrian’s cousins, a boy and a girl, sat in the back seat with him. They had pale faces with freckles of all shades from fawn to deep chocolate. Adrian always found it hard to talk to them. The girl went to the little brick Catholic school at Orford and the boy to the Christian Brothers in Colac. He travelled to and from Colac each day in a truck driven by a Catholic neighbour of the McAloons.

  Mr McAloon said to Adrian, ‘I suppose you’ve read in the papers all about the school-bus dispute.’ (Adrian had never heard of it.) ‘It’s the same old story. Catholics have to pay taxes to support the secular education system, but when they ask for a few seats in the high-school bus to Colac, all the non-Catholic bigots and wowsers for miles around are up in arms and writing to the Chief Inspectors in the Education Department in Melbourne.

  ‘Of course all the top inspectors and public servants are Masons, as you should know.’ (He spoke as though Adrian and his parents should have done something about this years before.) ‘Anyway, the result is that all the Catholics round here have banded together and organised a roster of cars and trucks to take the kids to secondary schools, and all the Catholic teachers in state schools have resigned from their union because of the anti-Catholic stand it took. We’ve got a long hard fight on our hands but we’re not going to give up until we get elementary British justice for our children.’

  After lunch Adrian showed his wife, Denise, around the farm. The freckle-faces weren’t interested in going with him. They stayed on the back veranda and played Bobs and Disney Derby. Adrian pitied them. They mooned around the house all day and never knew what was missing from their lives. Two or three of them were old enough to have boyfriends or girlfriends. The miles of green dairy country should have inspired even the dullest freckle-face to fall in love with a face across the aisle in St Finbar’s Church and then wait for months in suspense until the face turned round one day and showed by the faintest of smiles that there was some hope.

  Adrian of course was much more advanced in his love affair than that, because he had so many proofs already that Denise returned his devotion. As he walked towards the farthest paddock he was already sharing with his wife the joy of looking back on the September holidays in 1954 when he walked alone across bare paddocks and wished his loved one had been with him.

  That night Adrian found he had to share a bed with his oldest cousin, Gerard McAloon. Adrian kept his genitals carefully hidden while he undressed. Since meeting Denise he had rarely looked at them himself. They were no longer exclusively his, but the joint property of his wife and God and himself, to be used only in the marriage act on the nights when his wife agreed to it. He shuddered to think of the pale McAloon boy peering at things that were a secret between Denise and himself.

  Next day Mr McAloon took Adrian and Gerard and two younger McAloon boys to visit a place called Mary’s Mount. They drove to Colac and then south into the steep timbered hills of the Otway Ranges. Adrian’s uncle talked all the way about the people of Mary’s Mount.

  ‘They’re modern saints. Some of them are doctors and legal men and chaps with university degrees. They’ve given it all up to get back to the medieval idea of monasticism and living off the land. They bought nearly six hundred acres of bush with only two cleared paddocks and they’re turning it into a farm to supply them with all their needs. Except for books and clothes they share almost everything in common. They built their cottages and chapel with their own two hands. In a few years they’ll be weaving their own clothes and tanning their own leather for sandals or shoes. It’s the only sensible way to live.’

  Mr McAloon aimed his words at Adrian. ‘I don’t know how much your father has told you about the world yet, young fellow. But if you’re going to grow up a responsible Catholic layman it’s time you realised this country has never been in worse danger. I don’t know how you city people survive with all those trashy books and films. And what about the spread of Communism?

  ‘The only safe place to bring up a family nowadays is somewhere like Mary’s Mount. You’ll find in a few years there’ll be thousands of Catholic families getting back to the land and cutting themselves off from the city altogether. If anything can save Australia, the move back to the land can do it. Closer settlement. We haven’t got much time left. The experts reckon by 1970 at the latest the whole of Asia will have gone Communist. We need a population of at least thirty to forty million to defend ourselves. You can see what the Communists are doing right now in the jungles of Malaya. Well, people like the settlers at Mary’s Mount are doing something about it.’

  It was early afternoon, but the hills were so steep that the road between them was deep in shadow. Mr McAloon said, ‘I think the time I admired them most was when the Bishop of Ballarat refused to give them one of his priests to live on the settlement as their chaplain. Well, some of the leading families fixed up some tarpaulins and made a sort of covered wagon and loaded some tents and blankets on pack horses and started off walking and riding from Mary’s Mount to Ballarat.

  ‘I forget how many days it took them, but they got there and drove their wagon up the driveway of the Bishop’s Palace and squatted right there on the lawn. Now, don’t get me wrong. They’re fine folk. It’s just that they’re influenced by the customs of Catholic Europe. They don’t seem to care what ordinary Australians think of them. Some of the men wear their hair down over their collars, and one fellow who used to belong to the university has a bushy black beard. And I heard they had some homemade wine in their wagon and they started drinking the stuff on the Bishop’s lawn and handing round pieces of rather ripe cheese on the end of a knife. And Doctor Ray D’Astoli (he’s a talented man, Ray—gave up a wealthy practice in Melbourne to go back to the land), Ray D’Astoli rang the bell and said, “The Catholic farmers of Mary’s Mount within this diocese are come to wait upon the pleasure of His Grace, the Bishop, and crave audience with him.”

  ‘Those were the very words he used. He’s a wonderfully clever man, Ray. And the young priest who opened the door got all hot and bothered and didn’t know how to answer him. And they say the Bishop himself peeped through the curtains upstairs and thought a tribe of gypsies had descended on him. In fact the police in Colac went down to the camping ground when they were passing through because someone actually rang up and said the gypsies or some escaped lunatics had come to town.’

  Adrian said, ‘And did they get their priest?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no. It’s a long story and some of it’s not for young ears.’ (Mr McAloon glanced at his sons.) ‘You’ll see for yourself when we get to the Mount the single men and women have their own separate dormitories at least a hundred yards apart with all the married couples in between. But some people—even Catholics, I’m sorry to say—some people love to spread scandal and gossip whenever they see young men and women living up to ideals too high for themselves to match. More than that I’m not prepared to say. The Bishop didn’t want one of his priests serving a community with even the faintest breath of scandal about it. And so Mary’s Mount only has a mass in the chapel when a young priest comes down from Melbourne—he’s a brother of one of the founders of the settlement.’

  Mary’s Mount was on the side of a hill so steep that the driveway for cars stopped halfway up. The McAloons and Adrian walked up a footpath with logs set into the slippery soil for steps. They passed small timber cottages that reminded Adrian of the illustrations in Heidi.

  Mr McAloon stopped at a long
building like a barn and asked a man was Brian O’Sullivan at home. The man led them inside. Mr McAloon whispered to Adrian, ‘The single men’s quarters—laid out like the dormitory of a Cistercian monastery—marvellous stuff.’

  Ten little alcoves opened off a central passage. O’Sullivan came out of his alcove and took them inside. He and Mr McAloon sat on the bed—a camp stretcher covered with army blankets. Adrian and his cousins sat on stools cut from logs with globules of amber sap still stuck to their wounds.

  O’Sullivan said, ‘I spent the morning weeding potatoes, and now I’ve been reading St Thomas Aquinas.’

  He held up a large volume entitled Summa Theologica. ‘You know what we say up here at the Mount? “A man know’s he’s living well when he gets callouses of equal sizes on his knees and hands and backside.” It means he’s been kneeling in the chapel and working on the farm and reading in the library—all in equal proportions.’ Mr McAloon laughed loudly.

  When the men started talking about the potato crop, Adrian asked could he visit the chapel. The McAloon boys took him outside and further up the hillside. The chapel walls were of logs with the bark still on them. The seats inside were of unvarnished timber, but the altar and tabernacle were the real thing—polished wood draped with starched linen and coloured silk. And in the tiny sacristy Adrian opened the drawers of the cupboard and saw a coloured chasuble in each. While Adrian fingered the vestments, Gerard McAloon said he thought some clever women from the Mount had made them all with their own hands. There was supposed to be one lady who spent her whole time washing and ironing them and dusting the chapel and polishing the sacred vessels ready for the day when the community would have its own priest to say mass there every morning.

  Adrian shut the drawers and stood still. Leaves were scraping against the chapel roof. A blue-green bull-ant wandered across the well-scrubbed floorboards. Specks of dust drifted in and out of a thin shaft of sunlight.

  Denise was still beside him (although he had almost forgotten her in the excitement of visiting Mary’s Mount). He led her out of the chapel and pointed out to her the beauty of it all—the cottages half-hidden among the trees, the rows of green potato plants in the rich red soil, the little sawmill with its heaps of pale-yellow sawdust—and whispered to her, ‘How could we think of bringing up our children near Hepburn Springs when we could have them all here protected from the world with our own chapel on the property?’

  Back in the single men’s quarters, Mr O’Sullivan said, ‘I tried my hand at baking bread yesterday. It’s not too bad.’ He gave them each a piece spread with soft butter from a billy-can. Adrian’s piece tasted like a salted scone, but he finished it out of politeness.

  On the way home Adrian asked his uncle whether the McAloon family might settle at Mary’s Mount one day.

  Mr McAloon said, ‘Don’t think I haven’t given it a lot of thought. The only thing that stops me is I’d like to wait a bit longer and see what sort of farmers they turn out to be. Last year they lost a lot of money on potatoes through planting them at the wrong time. And they can’t sell any milk or cream because they won’t make their dairy conform to health standards. They should manage to be self-supporting in a few years, but they’ll always need some ready cash to pay for the little extras they can’t make themselves—like trucks and generators and machinery and rainwater tanks and cement and stuff.’

  Adrian said, ‘And books?’

  ‘Yes, books too. But just quietly I think some of those university chaps ought to spend a bit more time dirtying their white hands with work and a bit less time with their books.’

  At the top of a low hill near Colac Adrian looked back towards the Otways. From that distance he could see only gentle grey-blue slopes rising up from the cleared country. He was relieved to think that none of the people in Warrnambool trains or the cars that passed along the Princes Highway would guess what was hidden beyond those timbered slopes. Even if the Malayan terrorists or the Chinese Communists invaded Victoria, the Catholic couples of Mary’s Mount might still be safe and undiscovered in their shadowy gully.

  Mr McAloon said, ‘Now, don’t get me wrong. Those people ought to put us to shame. One day the rest of Australia will copy their way of life. But there’s always got to be humble soldiers like yours truly to go on fighting Communism in the outside world. I could tell you about the Communists we’re up against in the Labor Party, but that’s a story in itself. You just wouldn’t believe the terrific battle that’s going on all round us right now.’

  They left Colac behind and headed north towards Orford between tranquil green paddocks and through the long afternoon shadows of huge motionless cypresses.

  Sherd and his wife spent several weeks planning their move from near Hepburn Springs to a Catholic rural co-operative called Our Lady of the Ranges, deep in the Otways. Denise was taking just two dresses, two sweaters, two sets of underclothes and her bathers. Her husband was taking one suit, one old pair of trousers with an old shirt and jumper to match, a pair of overalls and his swimming trunks.

  They filled a small crate with all the books they would ever need—a Bible, the Catholic Encyclopedia, a History of the Church in twelve volumes, a bundle of Australian Catholic Truth Society pamphlets (mostly on purity and marriage to instruct their children in years to come) and some leaflets on farming published by the Department of Agriculture.

  They were going to sell their house and furniture and pay the proceeds to the co-operative. They would draw a small living allowance if they needed it—Our Lady of the Ranges was a true community like a medieval monastery. (People often forgot that monks and nuns were practising the perfect form of Communism centuries before Karl Marx was ever heard of.)

  One night just before they left for the Otways, Mrs Sherd asked her husband to continue the talks he had begun a little while before on marriage through the ages.

  Sherd propped a pillow under his head, arranged the lacy collar of his wife’s nightgown into a pretty frame for her chin, and said, ‘Like everything else, marriage changed a great deal after Our Lord came down to earth to teach. We know that He made marriage one of the seven sacraments of His new Church, but we don’t know exactly when He did it. Some theologians think He instituted the sacrament of matrimony while He was a guest at the wedding feast at Cana. If so, then the lucky couple of Cana were the first man and wife to be properly married in the Catholic Church.

  ‘This doesn’t mean, of course, that all the couples who married in Old Testament times were not properly married. If their intentions were good and they were following their consciences to the best of their ability, then their marriages were probably valid. (It’s the same with well-meaning non-Catholics today—many of their marriages are quite valid.)

  ‘Anyway, the important thing is that Our Lord did make marriage a sacrament. And He taught his disciples quite a bit about it too. He said, “What God has joined together let no man put asunder,” which of course makes all divorce impossible. And He said those beautiful words about the physical side of marriage. (I used to feel embarrassed whenever the priest read them out in the Sunday Gospel, but I suppose they were over your innocent head.) You know—the bit about a man leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife so they become one flesh.

  ‘But the words I can never forget, the saddest words, I think, in the whole New Testament, are the ones He said when the Scribes and Pharisees told Him about the woman who had seven husbands on earth and asked Him which one would have her for his wife in heaven. And He told them there was no marrying or giving in marriage in heaven.

  ‘They say everyone finds some stumbling block in the Gospels—some teaching of Christ that doesn’t make sense and has to be accepted on faith alone. Well, those words about marriage are my stumbling block. I think they’re cruel and unreasonable, I wish they weren’t true, but because Christ Himself said them I believe in them.

  ‘Bearing in mind what Our Lord Himself has said, let’s be coldly realistic about the life we’ll lead in
heaven. After the end of the world and the Resurrection of the Dead and the General Judgement we’ll all be given back our bodies. They’ll be glorified bodies of course. So, beautiful and flawless as your body is now’—Sherd gently stroked the whiteness of his wife’s throat—‘it will be a thousand times more perfect in those days. And let’s be quite frank about it—none of us will be wearing clothes. Theologians believe we’ll lose all our blemishes and moles and scars. I think myself we’ll probably also be without the ugly hair under our arms and elsewhere on our bodies.

  ‘There’ll be millions of people around heaven, but eternity is a long, long time and sooner or later you and I will meet up with each other again. Our glorified bodies will be based on those we had as young adults. So there we are, just as we were in the early years of our married life, meeting in some place even more beautiful than Tasmania. How will we feel towards each other?

  ‘Well, because I’m in heaven and my soul is saved, it would be absurd to think of me having an impure temptation when I see you, even though you’re stark naked and more beautiful than ever you were on earth. Besides, I would have got used to seeing beautiful young women naked all over the lawns every day in heaven (including, I suppose, a few film stars who repented on their deathbeds). In fact, if Our Lord was right about heaven (and He should have known, because all the time He was on earth His Divine Nature was enjoying Itself in Heaven, and as God the Son He helped to create the place anyway), you and I won’t feel any more affection towards each other than we feel towards any of the millions of other men and women of all colours in heaven—because otherwise we’d start to fall in love again and want to get married.

  ‘But the unfortunate thing is, we can’t help remembering all our lives together on earth. So when I look at your perfect body and all its most striking features I actually recall how excited they used to make me, although I don’t feel the slightest excitement any more.