A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  All the boys around Adrian joined in the discussion.

  ‘The Antichrist is going to be the church’s worst enemy. But he hasn’t come yet, and the world can’t end until he does.’

  ‘Will Elias know he’s Elias when he comes back? Or will he grow up thinking he’s just an ordinary Catholic schoolboy? He could even be one of us now.’

  ‘He’d have to be a Hebrew, though, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Wouldn’t he more likely come back the way he went up? I don’t mean in a fiery chariot, but roughly the same age.’

  ‘His body is somewhere in heaven right now. Seems creepy to think about it.’

  ‘That’s nothing. Our Lady’s body is there too according to the dogma of the Assumption.’

  ‘But what about the Antichrist? He won’t call himself that, will he?’

  ‘I used to think Stalin was him, the way he persecuted Catholics. But he’s dead now and the church is still going strong. Anyway, isn’t the church supposed to be defeated or nearly die out just before the end of the world? That’s not happening now, is it?’

  ‘There are four hundred million Catholics all over the world.’

  ‘Our Lord said, “Behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world.” The church can never be defeated.’

  Stan Seskis joined in and said, ‘Listen. My old man’s a nong most of the time. But he’s right when he talks about Communism. You droobs don’t realise what the Communists are doing in Australia right now. When my father heard the Russians were coming into our country during the war he packed everything into a little leather bag and my mother carried me and my little brother in her arms and we got for our lives. After the war we sneaked across the border of Germany into the West. We had to cross a ploughed paddock and I was bawling the whole time because my shoe fell off and I couldn’t go back to get it. That’s all I can remember—I lost my shoe. I wonder what the Reds did with it if they ever found it. But my father knows what Communism means because he’s lived with it.’

  Seskis kept talking. No one wanted to interrupt him. ‘And you know all this Petrov business and all the facts about Russian spies in Australia? Well, my old man’s known all about it for years. He knows the names of dozens of Communist spies in all the unions and the Labor Party and if it hadn’t been for him and his anti-Communist mates, the Commoes would have taken over Australia already. When I was a kid and we had all those strikes in Australia and grass was growing on all the train tracks and tramlines for months, well, my father came home one night and told us the Communists were just about ready to overthrow the government. He said it could happen any day, only this time they weren’t going to drive him out of his homeland a second time—he was going to stay and fight. And if you saw the list of Communists in his secret notebook (they’re all written in code) you’d be amazed how many enemies we’ve got all round us.’

  Another fellow said, ‘That Bishop from China who spoke to all the senior forms that day—the one with the white beard who wrote Chinese words on the blackboard and showed us his chopsticks—didn’t he say the Chinese Communists had a plan to come down through the islands to Australia? That’s why these terrorists are fighting in Malaya right now.’

  Someone else said, ‘But the Bishop told us there were millions of secret Catholics all over China—all the people the Columban Fathers had converted for fifty years. And if they get the chance they’ll rebel against the government and kick the Communists back where they came from.’

  Adrian Sherd said, ‘I was reading in a Reader’s Digest the other day how the greatest allies the West has are the millions of Russians and Poles and Czechs and so on who hate Communism. They’re waiting for the chance to rise up if only we could encourage them.’

  ‘Well, why doesn’t America just send an army in? The Russian people wouldn’t fight for Communism, would they?’

  ‘But the Russians have got the hydrogen bomb. There was a story in the Argus one day about a foreign power dropping a hydrogen bomb on Melbourne. (They meant the Russians, of course.) Well, this old bushman from the Dargo High Plains rode his horse down to Gippsland once a year and caught the train to Melbourne. Only this year he wondered why everything was so quiet and the trees all looked as though a bushfire had passed through. And about fifty miles from Melbourne he started to notice all these dead bodies. Well, he headed back to the bush, but the whole of Melbourne was wiped out.’

  ‘But why would the Russians pick on Melbourne anyway? Wouldn’t they bomb New York or Washington first?’

  ‘You know Therese Neumann. She’s a living saint in Germany. She’s still alive today in a village called Konnersreuth. For thirty years now she’s never eaten any food or drunk any water. The only thing that keeps her alive is her holy communion every morning. And every Thursday night she starts to suffer all the wounds and pains that Our Lord suffered in His Passion. And by Friday afternoon her face is covered with blood as if she had a crown of thorns pressing into her forehead, and all the marks of the stigmata appear on her hands and feet. The cleverest Protestant doctors in Europe have studied her for years and no one can explain how it happens. My mother wrote away to Germany once and got back a bundle of holy cards from Therese Neumann’s own village. All the prayers were in German but my cousin translated some of them. And there was this little leaflet with the whole story of the Miraculous Stigmata of Therese Neumann.

  ‘Anyway, Therese Neumann has made some prophecies, and the worst one I can remember is that priests will be hanging from lamp posts in Melbourne in 1970.’

  No one spoke for a while. All round the tree where they crouched, the raindrops made little holes like bomb craters in the mud. On the far side of the deserted football field, a ragged file of boys stumbled and ran towards the pavilion. Further still, on the other side of the creek, was a long grey paling fence that marked the end of all the backyards in some street of a suburb that Adrian Sherd had never entered. (He guessed it was Woodstock or Luton or even the edge of Camberwell.) The back porches were swept by rain and the doors and windows were all shut.

  A boy said, ‘What’s the percentage of Catholics in Australia, anyway?’

  Adrian answered, ‘Only about twenty-five per cent,’ and looked at the rows of locked non-Catholic houses on the hills around them.

  A man came towards them with a black oilskin cape hiding his face. It was a brother to tell them the football matches had all been abandoned and they’d better get for their lives back to the pavilion.

  The football pavilion had timber nailed over the windows where the glass should have been. The sky was so dark that the boys inside could barely recognise each other. Some of them went on talking about prophecies while they changed into their school uniforms.

  A boy said, ‘There was an old Irish monk centuries ago. His name was Malachy, I think. He made all these prophecies about the popes who were going to come after his lifetime. He said a few words about each pope like “Great Builder” or “Defender of the Faith” or “Destroyer of Heresies”, and so far they’ve all turned out true. He called Pius the Twelfth “Very Saintly Shepherd” or something, and it’s true he’s one of the holiest of all the popes.

  ‘Well, the scariest thing is—there’s only five or six popes left on Malachy’s list. So if he’s right, the end of the world could happen before the year 2000. Because the Catholic Church has to last until the end of time, and if there’s no more popes that’s the end of everything.’

  A fellow said, ‘But the Antichrist still has to appear. He’s probably alive now—a young man growing up in Russia or China and planning to destroy the church.’

  They all joined in again.

  ‘Antichrist will have to beat Elias first.’

  ‘Who wins in the end, anyway? Does the Apocalypse say whether the Catholics or Communists win the last battle?’

  ‘Our Lady told the children at Fatima that if enough people all over the world offered up prayers and penance, she would make sure Russia was converted and there’
d be no Third World War after all.’

  Adrian Sherd said, ‘We won’t have to fight the Russians on our own. I read a Reader’s Digest article about Turkey, and the Turks have always hated the Russians, even before they turned Communist. And they’re ready to fight them again if the Russians start anything. The end of the article was this big Turkish soldier looking across the frontier and saying, “One Turk has always been as good as three Russians in battle.”’

  ‘What about the secret message that Our Lady of Fatima gave to the children in a sealed envelope and told them not to open it for twenty years? And didn’t Francesca give it to the Pope and when he opened the first part of it a few years ago he fainted? And Francesca is a nun now, and her hair’s turned white because she knows the first part of the message too. When are they going to open the second and third parts?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but the nuns told us at primary school that when the Pope was seriously ill a few years ago he had a vision of Our Lord that he wouldn’t tell anyone about. But people in the Vatican think Our Lord must have told him something about the future and what will happen to the church and he’s hardly ever smiled or laughed since.’

  ‘If only Our Lord or Our Lady would appear to the Russians and show them a cross in the sky to frighten them or convert them or make them leave us alone.’

  ‘Even if they appeared in Australia to tell us how many years we’ve got before the end of the world! If it’s only going to be a few years we all ought to study for the priesthood instead of going to work or getting married.’

  ‘Did anyone read in the paper last year about that woman who drowned her two little kids in the bath and tried to gas herself because she didn’t want to be alive when the Communists took over the world? They put her in the loony bin but one of my mother’s friends knew her well and she said she could understand how any woman with young kids would do a thing like that nowadays.’

  Adrian and the little group around him were the last to leave the pavilion. They walked across the playing fields in pouring rain to the East Swindon tram terminus. No one talked any more about the end of the world.

  In the tram back to Swindon, Adrian stood near the door because his clothes were too wet to sit in. He stared at the enormous houses along the tramline and wondered, as he always did, who else beside doctors and dentists and solicitors could be wealthy enough to live in such places. In all his life he had never been inside the front gate of any house like them. But instead of envying the people inside (as he usually did), he almost pitied them.

  While hundreds of millions of Chinese and Russians were preparing for a Third World War, the people of Melbourne’s garden suburbs were going about their business as though there was nothing to worry about. They were thinking of wall-to-wall carpets and radiograms and washing machines while saints and prophets and the Reader’s Digest foresaw at least a terrible war and perhaps the last days of the world.

  Even if they went to church, the garden suburbs people only sang Protestant hymns or listened to long sermons about Hospital Sunday or gambling or being converted in your heart. Their sons went to Eastern Hill Grammar and enjoyed themselves at parties or looked forward to years at the university and careers in the professions, while Adrian prayed to God every night to put off the end for a little longer so he could enjoy a few years of happiness as the husband of Denise McNamara.

  But it wasn’t unfair that thoughtful Catholics had such worries while non-Catholics enjoyed themselves in their spacious homes. It was far better to look at the future realistically than to live for the pleasure of the moment. Adrian and his classmates had been brought up to think deeply about the things that really mattered. Their Catholic education had trained them to use their reason—to probe beneath the shallow surface that Protestants and atheists never questioned. And if the price that Catholic intellectuals had to pay was to worry about the terrible times ahead—well, at least they would have the last laugh one day when the Communists took over the garden suburbs or the armies of Elias and Antichrist drew up for battle on the outskirts of Melbourne.

  Adrian hoped that all these prosperous doctors and solicitors and their spoilt sons and daughters would have time before the end to apologise to the Catholics and admit they were right after all. Of course the fools would spend all eternity blaming themselves for their folly anyway, but it would be very satisfying to have some big golden-haired Eastern Hill fellow come up to the boy he hadn’t even noticed on the trams years before and say, ‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you Catholics tell us what was coming?’

  The answer to the fellow’s question, of course, was that he wouldn’t have listened anyway. All over Australia, Catholics like Stan Seskis’s father were trying to warn people about Communists in the unions, but how many listened to them? Only forty years before, Our Lady of Fatima had worked one of the most spectacular miracles of all time—the sun had danced and spun around and floated down towards the earth in front of sixty thousand witnesses—but how many people were doing what Our Lady had asked, and praying and offering up penance so that Russia would be converted?

  Even while the non-Catholics of Melbourne were sitting in front of their electric fires and their wives were fiddling with their expensive pressure cookers, a holy woman in Germany was still alive after fasting for twenty-five years—but who listened to her prophecies or took notice of her visions?

  The tram climbed the last hill towards the Swindon town hall. Adrian looked back at the miles of dark-red roofs and grey-green treetops and the mass of rain clouds above them. He knew it was wrong to gloat over the fate of thousands of people who had never deliberately done him harm. But he whispered into the breeze blowing past the tram that they were all doomed. And he saw the end of the world like grey rain bearing down on suburb after suburb—Oglethorpe by its winding creek, Glen Iris on its far hills, yes, and even Camberwell, the leafiest of them all—and the people in their last agony crying out that if only they could have had a Catholic secondary education they might have seen it coming.

  Early in the third term, the boys of St Carthage’s started practising for the House Sports Meeting. Adrian Sherd decided to train for the B-Grade 880 yards. Three nights each week he got out of Denise’s compartment at Caulfield and went to the racecourse to run. On those nights he always let his bag dangle open in the train so Denise would see his sandshoes and running singlet and realise he wasn’t deserting her for some frivolous reason.

  He thought of her all the time he trained. In his last year at St Carthage’s, after he had started to talk to her on the train, she would tell a white lie to her teachers and turn up at the Swindon Cricket Ground to see him run in the A-Grade 880. Meanwhile he improved his stamina by hissing her name under his breath as he ran.

  One night three other boys agreed to run a trial 880 yards with him at the racecourse. Adrian dropped out well behind them in the early part of the race. His breath came easily and he barely whispered Denise’s name. With about three hundred yards to go, he began his run. The effort to reach the others made him puff. He hissed the beloved name fiercely and didn’t care who heard him.

  The other runners were stronger than Adrian had expected. In a last desperate effort to catch them he fixed her face, pale and anxious, a little to one side of the winning-post and punished his weary body savagely for her sake. A few yards short of the finish he caught and passed one of his rivals, but the other two were already crossing the line.

  When the runners all stopped and looked at each other, Adrian suddenly heard the strange noise he had been making. It was always hard to fit the word ‘Denise’ into the rhythm of his breathing, and in the strain of the last hundred yards it had changed to a meaningless gasp, ‘Nees-A! Nees-A,’ that was no help at all to him.

  That night, for the first time since he had met Denise, he wondered if her influence over him might be weakening.

  A few nights later Sherd and his wife were climbing down towards a lonely riverbank in the Otways. It was Sunday afternoon and they wa
nted to be alone for a few hours, away from the people of Our Lady of the Ranges. They were surprised to hear squeals coming from the river. They got to the little beach in time to see a naked man and two naked women dash out of the water and sprint towards a big beach umbrella and a heap of towels and clothes.

  One of the women was a tall leggy brunette, and the other was a blonde with ample curves. Each of them kept an arm across her breasts and a hand between her thighs as she ran, so that Adrian was not forced to shield his eyes from them. But he flung himself in front of his wife to save her from seeing the man’s big hairy organ flopping up and down.

  Sherd took his wife to the far end of the beach, but he kept thinking of the man and the two women. More than once he was tempted to stroll over and start a friendly conversation with them. He tried to convince himself there would be no harm in it, since the women would almost certainly be fully dressed. But when he remembered he was a married man with a beautiful young wife beside him, he came to his senses and admitted he was experiencing an impure temptation.

  The boy Adrian Sherd was as shocked as the man when he realised how close he had come to turning his back on his wife and going into an occasion of sin. A few months before, the thrill of chatting to his wife in her bathers would have been so powerful that he could have kept his back turned all day on a beach full of naked film stars.

  He realised that the married life of the Sherds was becoming too remote from the daily life of the young Adrian Sherd. Mrs Denise Sherd was a wonderful wife, but perhaps a boy in Form Five needed someone nearer his own age.

  Adrian decided to act. On the very next night, he lay down in bed as usual, but instead of reaching out a hand to stroke the long black hair and the pale shoulder of his wife, he leaned across the compartment in the Coroke train and said to Denise McNamara, ‘Excuse me, but I’ve been meaning to speak to you for some time.’

  He wasn’t brave enough to look her in the eyes as he spoke. He watched her hands and was encouraged to see her fiddling with her gloves and exposing the creamy-white skin of her wrists. When she answered him, her voice was just as gentle and sincere as he used to dream it might be when he sat opposite her in the train and waited for them both to grow older so he could talk to her and begin his long patient wooing.