An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Where does he go?’

  ‘The compound for now.’

  ‘I’ll go with him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, you can’t do that, Father. Maybe you can visit him there later.’

  ‘Where later?’

  ‘The compound at Ingleburn.’

  They had marched Gervaise out. He called something forlorn to the women on the steps, but Fratelli had given the Australian provosts the task of pushing them indoors so that they could not touch or caress the prisoner. Gervaise was a sinner, yet this act of prevention seemed to Darragh, his head still full of thunder and echoes, to be harshest of all.

  One of the Australian soldiers had gone to the trouble to make tea in the kitchen which belonged to those women Darragh had not met and somehow knew he would not be permitted to meet. Sitting on a tree stump among the privet bushes, Darragh drank a cup hungrily, as Fratelli frowned over him like a brother. Then on the way back to the car, Fratelli sombrely asked Darragh whether he wanted something medicinal for the shock of it all, and somehow Darragh felt a returning warmth towards this striking young man.

  ‘You went through it,’ Fratelli murmured. ‘You certainly went through it, Father.’ He confused Darragh further by saying, ‘Now you know the size of things.’

  WITH HIS HEAD still full of the reverberations of the morning’s fusillade, Darragh went across to the school that afternoon, to, as he saw it, the comfort of children. He watched them emerge, and wondered whether some of them, despite their unseamed complexions and the transparencies of their souls, occupied some undefined furnace equivalent to the one he and Gervaise had shared. He was solaced by the sight of waiting mothers in the laneway between church and school. Mrs Heggarty was not there. Anthony Heggarty would be part of the convoy of Homebush-bound, mile-walking children conducted by other young mothers Darragh recognised but could not put a name to. He saw the boy run crookedly to his appropriate group and stand saying nothing, head down, earnest. Darragh felt a clot of anguish inside his ribcage, and was tempted to weep. He wanted to tell the boy, ‘Don’t be so willing.’ The world used such willingness profligately. The world despised it as a mute, uncomplaining resource. And after all, it detracted from alertness when there could be large steel vehicles driven by white-helmeted corporals. Anthony must slot himself in among the mean intentions of the world and get safely to his mother’s kitchen.

  It struck Darragh then, a happy revelation. The Americans have chaplains. There must be a telephone number, there must be a chaplains’ office. If he telephoned the cathedral, they would probably have the number. He could alert an American priest to the fact that Gervaise was an enlightened soul. He went across the tarred playground, making for the presbytery telephone above which the monsignor had pinned a typed list of crucial numbers including that of the chancellery at the cathedral. As he entered the hallway, and passed the painting of St Jerome which had so fascinated Fratelli, Monsignor Carolan, back a few hours early from his excursion, wearing a black cardigan over a singlet, black pants and carpet slippers, appeared at the door of his study.

  ‘Frank, come in, come in,’ he said, gesturing one-handedly, a man with a lesson to impart. Darragh went into the study, with its big desk tidily maintained, its photograph of an Irishman, Archbishop Kelly of Sydney, a prelate recently gone to God. The monsignor’s library was displayed on a shelf behind the desk, characteristic priest’s fare. The theological texts the monsignor had had since seminary days, solemn cloth encasing solemn Latin. The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, multi-volumed, redspined. This great work of Christian theology had the sort of presence on the shelf that keystone works of civilisation always exude—as if they can improve a person’s life and mind purely through their mute presence. Beside devotional works such as The Priest at His Prie-dieu, there was the poetry of Francis Thompson, the saintly alcoholic, and various works of GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, the great modern Catholic writers. These books stood for the fact that maligners spoke falsely when they said the Church crushed the creative spirit.

  The hardcovers were stored for reverence on the more visible shelves but gave way lower down to detective stories and Zane Grey’s western novels, which lacked the automatic power of St Thomas Aquinas, and thus actually needed to be read.

  The monsignor lit a cigarette and offered one to Darragh, but Frank Darragh did not smoke, chiefly on the aesthetic grounds that it made most men ashy and sloppy, that the residue showed up too easily on black serge. The monsignor, of course, was an exception. He did all these things impeccably.

  ‘Frank,’ he said once his cigarette was alight and drawn on, ‘you are a good fellow. But you’re beginning to annoy me. You do erratic things. Things contrary to all the wise counsels which govern the behaviour of young priests. This thing I’ve just heard about from Father Tuomey at Lidcombe. What were you doing there? Playing heroics in another parish. He’s really cranky about it, let me tell you.’

  Darragh explained that he had called Father Tuomey’s housekeeper, and both priests were out. Urgent with the truth of the proposition, Darragh said, ‘There was no time to wait or for slowing things down. They fully intended to shoot the man if necessary.’

  ‘I believe they did their best to anyhow, and to shoot you too, and then where would we be? Are you all right?’

  ‘A bit shaken,’ he conceded. But, he did not say, a bit exhilarated too. Particularly now he knew he might be able to keep track of Gervaise. But even before that, in various obscure ways, exhilarated.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to stand by you this time,’ said the monsignor. Frank wondered, with a residual acidic briskness, whether his willingness to say early morning Masses, to hear confessions, to take Benedictions, helped the monsignor to be lenient. ‘But what you have to understand, you might see things as urgent when they’re not. From what I hear this black man was cohabiting with a white woman. He was a deserter from his post. He doesn’t sound like grounds for urgent attention. I mean, despite all these romantic ideas about a priest being put in situations where he saves the souls of unknown people, people outside his normal reach, in practice that might happen once or twice in a lifetime. A fellow is faced with a man dying of apoplexy in George Street, outside Hordern’s store—that happened to me when I was young. Swallowed his tongue and no one knew how to save his life. But it seems to me there’s a tendency in you, Frank, that seeks this sort of drama at every turn. Well, you ought to sit on that. Don’t embarrass me with other parish priests. You understand? Let me know if you’ve got some extraordinary intention. And you’re not in the American army. So they can’t come here and make you do jobs for them.’

  It was a consideration: If there were chaplains, why didn’t Fratelli use one of them? But there might have been some official problem about doing that. Fratelli’s summoning Darragh might thus have been a gracious, ex tempore gesture towards saving the prisoner. On the other hand, had Darragh not been there to hear Private Aspillon’s confession, the MPs might not have begun to fire. Darragh did not have the energy left, in the fact of the monsignor’s chastisement, to follow the reasoning further.

  ‘Since I did go, Monsignor,’ said Darragh, ‘and since I heard the man’s confession and gave him absolution, I want to contact the American chaplains to look after him.’

  The monsignor groaned and said, ‘American chaplains,’ in rather the way a person would say, ‘Bulgarians!’.

  ‘I’ll get the number from the chancellery. He’s a remarkable soul, this black man …’

  The monsignor tossed his head and stubbed his cigarette with emphasis. ‘Residing with a slut in Lidcombe? It sounds like it. Call the chaplains if you must.’

  ‘And I’ll speak to Father Tuomey.’

  ‘No, leave the old crank alone.’

  The monsignor sat at his desk again and opened a ledger. The Summa Theologica shone down on his financial labours. ‘One thing I will say for the American troops. They’re very generous with the collection plate. But they can’t buy rede
mption, can they?’

  Now Darragh felt robust of soul. He still suffered an occasional brimstone whiff of futility from his contacts with Mrs Heggarty, her air of command and independence, her good heart and self-diagnosed rebelliousness—a combination of traits he considered, as the Church did, dangerous to her. But now his duties possessed some meaning, since Gervaise and he had been welded together under fire and in sacramental intent.

  Calling the chancellery, he found that a young priest he had studied with answered the phone and was able to supply him with the number of the US Army Chaplains Corps. Ringing them in turn, he spoke to a soldier who described himself as the chaplains’ assistant. He certainly sounded like a doorkeeper to eminent persons. He was unimpressed by the idea that this was an Australian diocesan priest calling. There was no rudeness, but merely a sense that Darragh lay beyond the man’s universe and thus need not be treated with too much alacrity. ‘All the chaplains are busy.’

  ‘There’s something called the compound.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the man. ‘That’s out near the Aussie camp. In Ingleburn.’

  ‘Does compound mean the same as prison?’

  ‘If you like, Father,’ the chaplains’ assistant conceded. ‘A more temporary structure, you’d find. A stockade. That’s Captain O’Rourke’s territory, anyhow.’

  ‘And Captain O’Rourke is a chaplain?’

  ‘Yessir, that’s what he is.’

  ‘So Father O’Rourke,’ said Darragh, wanting to assert the essence of all this, that God and not the army, not the white centurion helmets of Fratelli’s men, had the claim upon this unknown O’Rourke. ‘I would like to ask Father O’Rourke to visit this soldier I know. When could I speak to him in person?’

  ‘Well, he’s after-dinner speaker at the officers’ club tonight. You could try him in the morning.’

  ‘Would you give him my number as well?’

  ‘Sure, Father,’ said the chaplains’ assistant with the first note of willingness that had entered their dialogue.

  ‘Please ask him. It’s important. It’s about one Private Aspillon.’ Darragh spelled it.

  ‘Private Aspillon. I’ll tell him.’ And then, ‘Don’t you worry about it at all, Father.’

  But caught between the strictures of Monsignor Carolan and the explosive savagery of the American army, he did worry for the integrity of Gervaise’s flesh.

  On Saturday Father O’Rourke proved yet again not to be in when Darragh called, and failed to phone back as well. Darragh had spent the day expecting the call and, apart from confessions, prepared a questioning sermon for Sunday. Altogether, it was natural that his sermon should reflect the state of his soul and of his immediate world. The Dutch and Australians reinforced the text by failing to hold Sumatra. Rabaul was bombed, and its Australian garrison looked likely to follow that of Singapore into indefinite but terrible imprisonment. Soon there would be further Mrs Heggartys scattered around the pews on Sunday mornings. And in a short time, for all they knew, their church might be a stable for the species of pack mules the Japanese army had been filmed using in China.

  ‘My dear brethren,’ said Darragh from the high pulpit on Sunday, ‘we are in the time of joy following Easter, but even in this season of jubilation, in the forty days after Christ’s resurrection, all is still threatened. Our food is rationed, our community endangered, we hear bad news every day on the wireless, while sons are separated from mothers and wives from husbands without any of us knowing how long this will go on. Some of us have the comfort of our faith, but for many good people there’s a sense that God has turned His face away. Some wonder if even the armies of the just, the American army and our own, do not harbour some unjust men. Is God testing us, or—and I, like you, hope this is not the truth—does He intend to punish us? For still cricket and rugby league and horseracing from Randwick are front-page news. Still the cinemas hold out images of godless pleasure. Still the divorce courts are full.’ He knew this from reading the court proceedings published in every weekend’s Telegraph. He, who intended never to have a wife, was as fascinated by tales of divorce as most priests were. At tennis on Monday, his fellow curates recounted divorce cases they had read about over the weekend. They were somehow pleased to have their cynicism about marriage validated.

  ‘And yet everywhere there is hope,’ he said, as his brethren wanted him to. ‘Even today. I take some of my hope from a soldier I spoke to this week. He was a foreign soldier, and he had behaved badly, and he had done wrong. But I found in him a clear sense of what contrition was, and for a moment we were brothers in the Catholic faith, in the way that MacArthur’s Americans and General Blamey’s Australians are brothers in their crusade against the enemy. So, all can be taken from us. We can be the subject of every disgrace. Bombs might land among us, God forbid. Our young men might be captured or die in battle. There is one thing which cannot be taken from us. Our …’

  He paused because the words ‘our dignity’ had by the force of Mrs Heggarty’s sedition nearly risen to his lips. It was as if the woman and her phrase had lodged under his skin. ‘Our faith,’ he said instead. ‘That cannot be taken by force. It can be surrendered only of our own volition. We know that whatever happens in the future, however battles fall out, resurrection in its most important form will come to us, and salvation in its most important form. As for the rest, for the battles which await, we join each other in our prayers for deliverance.’

  Though it was early in April, the heavy, white, braid-encrusted chasuble felt hot, and temporarily removing it while waiting in the sacristy between the half-past-six and eight o’clock Masses, Darragh saw a somehow familiar soldier appear tentatively at the door.

  ‘Hello there,’ Darragh said with some enthusiasm. The Mass, and his own words of hope, had made the world more fraternal.

  ‘It’s me, Father. I was with the American MPs.’

  Darragh saw the corporal’s stripes on the man’s arm. He was the Australian soldier who had had the look of having been a Great War digger. He also possessed the enduring, creased face of a fellow who’d known the humiliation and the hunger of the Depression.

  ‘I had the Owen gun the Yanks said went off.’

  Darragh unpinned the maniple from his wrist and stepped forward. ‘Please come in,’ he said. The man did so, looking in awe at the vestment benches and the little stained-glass window which featured St Brigid of Ireland. To Catholics, a sacristy was an august place, occupied chiefly by clerics and acolytes.

  ‘I didn’t like that the other day,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t like what the Yank sergeant said. But they’ve had an enquiry and I got shouted down. I know how to use an Owen gun, and I didn’t make any mistake. The sergeant started it off. With his bloody pistol, Father. Pardon my language.’

  If this were the truth, there was part of him which would not have wanted to know. That the angelic courtier and warrior, Fratelli, could be so crafty. Could he also be vicious in his cunning?

  Darragh said, like a military veteran, ‘Well, I wouldn’t hold it against any man if his gun misfired.’

  ‘That’s the whole thing, Father. I wouldn’t have come here to see you—my parish is Stanmore. If I thought I’d done it, I’d just lie doggo and feel silly, like any other chap would. You know you said in your sermon that not all soldiers are just men. Well that bugger—I mean, that American—he isn’t. He’s a blame-shifter, that one.’

  ‘He seemed sincere enough to me. What I mean is, he had the welfare of the Negro man at heart.’

  ‘Well, he was more than willing to set his blokes off. And everyone knows the Yanks are trigger-happy. Australian armies, we were raised to be sparing with ammunition. But not them. They squander. That’s why I think in the end they might do all right. Their soldiers aren’t as good as ours. Full of cheek, absolute skites. But, crikey, they’ve got some gear.’

  ‘So you think he blamed you to save his own embarrassment.’

  ‘That’d be right. And we’re handy too, for them to blame
. They think we’re hillbillies. Even their hillbillies think we’re hillbillies. But I wanted to tell you, anyhow. It wasn’t the Owen. The Owen is a gun a bloke can depend on.’

  Frank thanked the corporal, wished him well and saw him vanish. The corporal’s accusations against Fratelli would have been easier to dismiss had Darragh, in the ten minutes during which he waited to go out to the altar for the next Mass, not been able to review his brief but intense contacts with Fratelli and decide that they had, after all, displayed from the sergeant’s side, among the decisiveness and goodwill, and perhaps because of them, the shadow of an indefinite excess. Diverting his convoy just to pick up a priest in Strathfield seemed part of it. And yet, how could the man be condemned? The fine-spirited Gervaise, the theologically accurate Private Aspillon, had been comprehensively saved by Fratelli’s decision.

  On a busy Sabbath it was easy to attribute what the corporal had told him to the rivalry between Americans and Australians, which, as everyone knew, lay beneath the surface of their brotherly cooperation in the cause of the Christian world.

  THAT SUNDAY EVENING he got a call from the American chaplain. ‘Captain O’Rourke,’ the man announced himself, and Darragh explained that he was concerned for Gervaise Aspillon.

  ‘Yeah, I know the case, Father,’ said O’Rourke. He had a voice like James Cagney.

  ‘Gervaise made a sincere confession to me. I’m concerned that he might not be well treated in the … the compound.’

  ‘Well, the guy was AWOL three weeks. Sounds like desertion to me. Only stood out where he was hiding because he was a coloured.’

  ‘I wondered would you visit him, Captain?’ Darragh used the military title because he had a sense Father O’Rourke was flattered by it.

  ‘Sure. I’ve already been round there. Said a decade of the rosary with him.’

  ‘And was he well?’

  He heard a sigh from Father O’Rourke. What business was it of this Australian curate?