by Tom Keneally
THIS BLAZING DAY proved itself to be one ripe with incident when, having returned to the recitation of his office, he heard the telephone ring.
‘I’m so sorry, Father,’ said Mrs Flannery. ‘There’s a Mr Flood on the telephone for you.’ He closed his breviary again, his heart pumping at the unexpectedness of this summons.
It was indeed Mr Bert Flood, speaking loudly but in his normal neutral tone. ‘Father Darragh. Ross is off to a trade union meeting in Lithgow. The missus wondered could you call in today?’
Darragh said that of course he could.
‘She’s not up to much anymore. The smoke’s bad for her. The doc gives her a month or two.’ In his way Bert was saying, she’s not capable of sinning now—only of suffering. ‘This is a chance for those last rites, you know, if you want …’
Ross Trumble was away, and so Mrs Flood was willing to die as a secret penitent. It seemed she did not intend to tell her lover. This was a very pragmatic use of Christ’s sacraments. The absolutism of Darragh’s nature until recently would have frowned on such a dodge. But now that the world had grown complicated, he was willing to be of service to Mrs Flood on any terms. He felt a light-heartedness at last descend on him as he put on his clerical stock and collar, and crossed through the particled air to the sacristy, which the thick bricks of the church had kept cool. He put on his stole and white thigh-length surplice, fetched the small black bag in which he would carry all that Mrs Flood needed, retrieved the keys to both the tabernacle and the locked box on the sanctuary wall where the holy oils were kept, and walked out onto the altar steps, feeling once more the excitement of the complex duties ahead of him. The altar had been clothed by the women of the altar society in the violet altar facings of Lent. He ascended the steps after genuflecting, moved aside the altar card in front of the tabernacle, the one with the prayers for the Offertory and Canon of the Mass, which he knew by heart. He pushed aside the violet tabernacle cloth, feeling again gratefully fed by these ritual movements, and with the key opened the bronze tabernacle, the strongbox of the Divine. Here, along with a large, full-bodied and lidded silver cup named the ciborium, the feeder, containing altar breads which would be transmuted into the body and blood of Christ at Mass tomorrow morning, was a further such vessel, veiled in violet, containing some communion hosts consecrated by himself at that morning’s Mass and left there for emergencies such as a call from Bert Flood. He removed the veil and lid of this one and placed two hosts in the disc-like metal container, the pyx, from the silk-lined bag he had brought from the sacristy. He made sure the clasp on this disc clicked tight shut, preserving the body of Christ from contamination until it deigned to rest on Mrs Flood’s capricious tongue.
Having locked the tabernacle and adjusted its veil and again genuflected, he moved down the steps to the left side of the altar. Here another but less ornate metal box was attached to the wall. He unlocked it and saw before him three metal canisters, tubular urns, on a shelf. The holy oils. The oil, consecrated by the archbishop at the cathedral in Sydney each Easter Thursday morning, was fetched out to every suburb by the parish priest or the curate. Again, Monsignor Carolan always sent him, Darragh, to attend the ceremony in an alb and stole to bring back a year’s supply of the three species of oil. Yet it was the allure of these mysteries which had brought him to the priesthood. Although he was attached to his parents by an intense love of the kind which preempted any questioning, he had seen nothing in their marriage to attract him to the state. Marriage—both their faces said it at different times—was hard, and uncertain. Fred Astaire might dance in tails with Ginger Rogers, but real life, and dogged love, seemed noble yet squalid. The memory of physical love, of what people called sex, seemed to tease people with wistful memory rather than make them happy. The priesthood, with its arcane knowledge, the drama of the rites, rose above the doubt and the ordinariness of the moment. It had a vestment, an incantation and a soothing code only its priests understood. Who would not want to become a priest, and consider it an honour?
Each canister before Darragh carried engraved letters to identify its separate use. O. C. for baptisms; O. S. for confirmations; O.I., oleum infirmorum, for the anointing of the ill. He added this latter canister to a metal bracket fitted into his black bag. Vanity again arose—the idea that Mrs Heggarty might respect him better if she saw his competence among these symbols and substances. But he shook it away. The memory of cautionary tales about fallen priests recurred. The alcoholic priest who had left the priesthood, mixed with prostitutes, and one night, crazy for drink and in pure malice, consecrated the entire contents of a bread shop window. Once a priest and always a priest, he had transformed the bread into Christ’s body, making his Saviour hostage to whatever customer, pure or impure, Catholic or Protestant, ate of the contents of the shop. And a companion tale: the same kind of priest, lying with a fallen woman who suddenly goes into the throes of death. She pleads for the last rites, the oleum infirmorum, and he goes to the kitchen and, purely to appease this dying woman, fetches butter and anoints her. These tales indicated that a fallen priest was a dangerous man, an assassin, a mocker. He was not yet such a man, but to think of Mrs Heggarty so compulsively was to reach the first station on a very long line which led to a version of the priesthood which exploded inwards on itself.
There were some four or five hours of sunlight left as he took to Homebush Road and its bubbling tar, now carrying his surplice and stole and two candlesticks in a bag somewhat like a workman’s, and also within it the small black box containing not only the pyx and hosts and oil, but wads of cotton to apply the unguent to Mrs Flood’s organs of sense. A professional pride helped him deal with the bullying heat and the stained air. Extreme unction. An anointment at the last. A smearing of those human extremities which had walked into, sniffed, eyed or tasted wrong. In the Eastern Orthodox Church priests anointed the loins, the region of so much lethal peril, but fortunately that was not the custom with the Roman Church.
Bert Flood, opening the door of the little house with a greater speed than last time, wore what looked like the same vest and pants and collarless shirt as before. ‘Oh yairs,’ he said, as if he had forgotten he had called Darragh. ‘The missus is in the bedroom.’
He was one of those Australians who confused Darragh. Bert Flood’s demeanour bore out the description given by one of the bush poets: ‘Hadn’t any opinions, hadn’t any ideas.’ He appeared as if he had leached all anger, enthusiasm and purpose out of his soul, to the extent Darragh wondered how he ever got himself to the intense point of proposing marriage to Mrs Flood, and what she thought of him when she agreed. But in his way, he had achieved a dramatic point now by opening the door to Darragh.
Bert led him to the first room off the corridor. Darragh noticed a pleasant smell of menthol and camphor in Mrs Flood’s bedroom. The woman herself lay diminished in the middle of the bed, buttressed with pillows, and there was a hectic redness to her cheeks. Beside her on a wicker table lay various brown bottles, and a glass with the dregs of some fluid still in it. A picture of a sylvan arbour, bearing no resemblance at all to the landscapes in which Mr and Mrs Flood had conducted their marriage, sat over the bed, in its way like a prayer for Eden, or for a cleansed earth in which all growth and all manners were orderly. Both partners had failed the idyll.
It seemed to Darragh that in aging by ten years since he had last seen her, Mrs Flood had managed to become more ageless. Wastage was visible, however, in the way her facial bones made claim upon the rosy filament of flesh laid over them. The death’s head was threatening to emerge. The humming rattle of her breath was a permanent sound. There was no tubercular charm to it today. It sounded frankly like the clatter of some failed mechanism.
‘She’s not too flash at talking for long,’ said Bert. But her eyes were alight as they picked up Darragh’s arrival. In the context of her decline, her smile seemed more childlike than girlish. But at least she was not one of those of whom Christ said, ‘I wish you were either hot or c
old, but since you are neither, I shall spit you out of my mouth.’
Darragh asked, ‘Could I put the pyx and the oil on the table here?’ Bert nodded, bustled past, and rearranged the bottles of medicine and tonic to make room for Darragh. Then he touched Darragh on the elbow and gave him a solemn wink. ‘I’ll leave you to it, Father. I’ll get the kettle on.’
‘You’re welcome to stay, Bert. It’s your house.’
The idea seemed to panic Bert.
‘No. I’ll get the kettle on.’
For that was the great secular sacrament—tea. Before Bert had even left, Mrs Flood reached out and grasped the hem of Darragh’s coat, dragging him closer. ‘Don’t make Ross clear out. We met in the sanitarium. He had this curse too. He’s a good fellow. And I’m past it all now. Past every crime, eh? If you come on heavy, it’ll only make trouble for poor old Bert. All right?’
It was apparent from the effort this took that she could not make a detailed confession.
‘Don’t talk,’ he said, in command with the dying. ‘You can nod, Mrs Flood.’
She nodded to show she could. A new submission had entered her.
He unpacked his bag, placed the two candlesticks from his small black case on the table, lit them, put on his surplice and stole, while Mrs Flood’s eyes glittered with a kind of hunger at all these activities. He instructed her to pray mentally with him while he recited the Act of Contrition.
‘Oh my God,’ he intoned, ‘I am heartily sorry and beg pardon for all my sins …’
She said arduously, ‘There’s one thing, Father. You know why I married Bert. He didn’t make a fuss of me. I was impressed. We worked for this store in Cobar, and Bert was a warehouseman, and I sold frocks. The boss was always grabbing for me. But Bert didn’t make a fuss. It turned out he couldn’t make a fuss of anything, poor old dear.’
‘Don’t talk, Mrs Flood. You don’t need to.’
‘These … what you call, sins of the flesh.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘They’re not so bad. They’re just silly little things half full of dark. But there’s light and heat too …’
‘Yes, but you repent of them?’
‘Look at what the Japs did in Hong Kong … and the Black and Tans in Ireland … They were sins!’
‘But the people who committed them don’t have the benefit of our beliefs,’ he said, entering into the debate despite himself. ‘Leave it all to God and repent.’
‘All right,’ she gasped. ‘I do.’
‘Please, you don’t have to talk. Just nod.’
Indeed she nodded with a poignant urgency. Confession was easy for the sinner of limited breath. Mrs Flood continued to nod her affirmation of repentance as Darragh recited. Her lips throughout worked dryly on the sentiments she lacked the breath to state. She said ambiguously, ‘I’m sorry for Bert,’ as he absolved her.
Then he took the small white host out of the pyx, and she opened her mouth as taught in childhood, and he placed it on her tongue. ‘Now, Mrs Flood, you’ll understand I must wash my hands before I open the holy oil. Is that all right?’
‘Don’t be delicate on my account,’ she instructed him, pointing with her right hand in the bathroom’s direction.
He went and found it, scrubbing himself at the basin from which hung an old razor strop, possibly Bert’s. Bert had laid out a clean towel. In his way the fellow was astonishing. Darragh went to find him to ask him would he help with the bedclothes, since they would need to be moved back for the anointing. But Bert was not in the kitchen, or on the awninged verandah which was his isolation ward from both marriage and the disease.
Returned to Mrs Flood’s room, Darragh took up the container of oil from its bracket in the black case and, with the appropriate words, absolved with this holy chrism her eyes for all the wrong they had seen, her ears for the burden of what they had heard, her nostrils for having drawn the breath of sin, her hands for their ill-considered caresses, her mouth for its mortal appetites, and finally, the sheets drawn back, her feet, pink and delicate and not like normal suburban feet, for walking in dangerous paths. ‘Per istam Sanctam Unctionem indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid deliquisti—Through this blessed oil may the Lord forgive whatever ill you did.’
The passive effort involved in having the sheets pulled up to her chest again by Darragh seemed to exhaust her. Darragh ate the second host himself, and stood in prayer a moment.
‘I’ll try to find Bert,’ he said.
This time Bert was in the kitchen, unpacking a brown bag. ‘I ducked round to Moran and Cato’s for some biscuits,’ he said in his voice of flat melancholy, yet it was touching to find that he considered Darragh’s being there an event, a significant passage, worthy of the good cups and a few Arnott’s shortbreads.
‘Mrs Flood is finished,’ said Darragh. ‘I mean, she’s been anointed, and the rest.’
‘Righto,’ said Bert. ‘She’ll be happy. And Ross will be sweet. His bark’s worse than his bite. He feels he has to be rude to you. Union rules.’
The Daily Mirror was on the table with its predictable stories of Allied progress in Africa and Allied devastation in Asia. All the military success was in the wrong place for Bert and Darragh, and came at the cost of Lance Bombardier Heggarty’s capture and Mrs Heggarty’s endangered soul.
Darragh said, ‘Mrs Flood will be safe now from all this.’ He waved his hand at the headlines. As soon as he said it, he thought he might have uttered the wrong sentiment.
‘She’ll be missed,’ said Bert. ‘She was a lovely girl. She was an usherette at the State when we came down to Sydney, believe it or not. Don’t know what she was doing with an ugly bugger like me. Pardon the French, Father.’
‘French?’
‘My swear words. Pardon them.’
‘Of course.’
A half-grin came to Bert’s face. ‘Not that I’m likely to give them up, you know. I hope Ross didn’t say anything too nasty to you last time you were here?’
‘No,’ Darragh lied.
‘See, he can be an angry mad bugger. Make a good soldier if he hadn’t had the crook lungs himself. An orphan, you know—at least his mother died young and he was on his own. Most orphans are angry buggers because they feel they didn’t get a fair shake. Toys at Christmas and all that stuff. Had a hard life, of course. But no sooner does the party say we need you somewhere than he’s there. Works like a Trojan, that feller.’
Darragh wondered what a priest could say when the wronged husband clicked his tongue over the well-known and affectionately recorded traits of the lover.
Tea finished, Bert led him up the hallway and paused at the bedroom door to allow Darragh to say goodbye to Mrs Flood. But the woman was noisily yet delicately sleeping. Raised and redeemed on her pillows, she wore the same gracefully amused smile she had before he had laid the oil upon her extremities.
‘Call on me again, Bert. Whenever Mrs Flood wishes.’
He was no longer frightened of Trumble, knowing him to be himself a frightened, fatherless child helped reduce his Marxist ardour to size.
OVER THE PAST few days, the smoke had been dissipated by rain and cold southerlies, and Darragh had begun to wonder if Anthony Heggarty had remembered to pass the letter to his mother. It seemed to him to justify the monsignor’s low estimation of him that he had entrusted such an important document to a first-grade child.
Darragh consoled himself during downfalls with a book of Monsignor Knox’s witty essays, The Mass in Slow Motion, in the parlour. Now that the first breath of winter had struck, it provided a congenial corner. Looking through the parlour’s side window, he saw the child, Anthony, standing at the door, gathering himself to knock, water in his hair. Darragh moved quickly, to get to the door before the bell alerted Mrs Flannery.
Seeing him, Anthony extended his hand, an envelope in it, spotted with warm rain. ‘Thank you, Anthony,’ said Darragh. ‘Are you well?’
‘The Nazis have my father,’ said the boy. This seemed to be
obviously a quotation from Kate Heggarty. ‘But it means he’ll come home safe.’
‘Yes,’ said Darragh. ‘And I pray that it’s soon.’ And he did. He wanted Mrs Heggarty’s soul. He wanted her submission as he’d wanted Mrs Flood’s.
The boy seemed happy and went away across the wet gravel towards the school. Darragh took the plain white envelope inside. The writing on it was in parish convent copperplate. Thou shalt know them by their hand … Under her address in The Crescent she had carefully written the date, and the letter was rather touchingly set out in a manner not unlike a school essay. ‘Go home, girls,’ you could virtually hear a nun in Kate Heggarty’s girlhood say, ‘and for your homework write the sort of letter you would write to a priest if you wanted spiritual advice.’
Dear Father Darragh,
It is very kind of you to take an interest in our welfare. We would be honoured to have the blessing of your visit on our house at this troubled time. Except that I do not want to argue the matter with you again. I feel we argued the matter enough last time.
I am now working every day until three o’clock, so that it would be better if you were to visit Anthony and me. It would need to be in the later afternoon about four.
Yours sincerely
Kate Heggarty (Mrs)
She said no arguments, but she wanted to see a priest, and that was the first step, Darragh believed. A more critical voice within asked who she thought she was to put limits on a priest? She had no right to expect an easy visitation, not after her forthrightness in the presbytery parlour. Besides, she might simply relish playing with him, flexing her power over him by making him desire her salvation. So, for his own part, he intended to consider and not to rush.