by Tom Keneally
Darragh rallied under Trumble’s normal hot breath and predictable interrogation.
‘Her boyfriend,’ asked Frank. ‘Did you ever see him?’
Trumble seemed genuinely tickled. ‘His Eminence as Sherlock Holmes! How do you know I’m not the monster? You told bloody Kearney I might be.’
‘I didn’t tell him that,’ said Darragh. And then, as if by inspiration, ‘Do you still believe everything the police tell you? Maybe you’ll end up believing everything I tell you.’
Trumble shook his head. ‘I know that bastard Kearney. He nearly had me in gaol in 1940. Now he comes round and tries to convince me I’m the fancy man. If I hadn’t been out all night with a friend who’s a journalist at the Telegraph, he would have had me for it, too. That bastard would like to hang me. Have me yelling, “Bless me Father” on the gallows. But he’s only a straightforward cop, that Kearney.’
‘Straightforward?’
‘Yeah. You can see through him. You’re the sort of bastard no one can see through.’
For a second Darragh had a giddy daydream of having Trumble write down and sign such a statement. It would amaze the monsignor, who found Darragh so transparent. ‘You give me too much credit, Ross.’
‘Don’t bloody Ross me! You know, the day’s not far off when we’ll put you against the wall like we did to the priests in Madrid, and we’ll put a hot bullet in your heart.’ But Trumble paused and seemed to decide this would not be adequate. ‘And still the ignorant will come creeping with their little handkerchiefs and mop up your blood and expect it to cure them of goitres.’
Darragh did not know where the impulse to confide in this hostile, half-tipsy Marxist came from. Darragh was God’s storm-trooper only in Trumble’s mind. In the monsignor’s, in the vicar-general’s, he was an ee-jit and a cautionary tale.
‘I’m just another man, Ross. Just another confused battling yokel.’
‘Oh yeah. You really loved it when I said that to you last time. Well, let me repeat, Sonny Jim. To me you are just another bloke. And there! You are!’ And to emphasise the there he punched Darragh full force on the shoulder. But then he seemed to despair of blows. ‘There’s nothing I can do to you to make up for your bloody creeping influence on Rosie.’
‘In the case of Mrs Flood,’ Darragh told him, willing now to stoke the man’s confusion of soul, his shoulder smarting, ‘it wasn’t me at work. It was something more than me.’
He was perversely delighted to see Trumble’s certain fury return. When you strike again, he thought, I’ll damn well strike you!
‘Oh, save me from that I–am–but–an–instrument shit,’ Trumble declared, showing in his maddened eyes how well Darragh’s line had worked. ‘That makes me really fucking angry. I could beat the fucking certainty out of you.’
Darragh said, ‘I think you might be more certain than me. We both try to live by great certainty, don’t we?’
‘Don’t bloody say that,’ shouted Trumble. ‘That’s utter bull-shit! My certainties have a scientific, social and economic basis. Yours are fucking fairytales.’
‘Maybe that’s why I’m having a few problems with them,’ Darragh admitted, ringing the changes now between divine messenger and ordinary fellow. Although, he noticed, even in the midst of all this yelling, it was easier to be frank with an enemy than with the guardians of the Faith.
Trumble asked, ‘If you’ve got any doubts, why did you need to come hunting down Rosie and Kate?’
Darragh, the darkness of his rage a potent comfort, was enjoying himself. He had Trumble’s head spinning, he could see. Darragh’s mother had spoken in awe of his gentle father’s Gaelic temper emerging in his youth, the power of his rage, his determination that the insulter should not walk away before blows were thrown and blood drawn. That madness was in him now, but he retained throughout his cunning in debate.
‘Look, Ross,’ he said, ‘I believe in the flawed nature of humanity. I believe Stalin is as lustful for power as any man. I believe the Pope is subject to sin. You believe people are born perfect, and it’s ownership that destroys them, that having it or not having it is all that makes them bad. You’re more innocent than I am. You’re touchingly innocent. You’d make a damn good student for the priesthood.’
‘I can’t bloody believe this,’ said Trumble, casting his eyes to the mute-dark sky, and at a loss to take the discussion further, he threw a considerable punch at Darragh. It landed on the side of his neck, an improbable level of force and intent in it. Darragh, very satisfied, could not stop himself bending over, gagging, and thus inviting Trumble into his defences. It was easy for Trumble now to strike him again on the upper cheek, showing great accuracy for a man who had been drinking. It was as Darragh had read in the novels—the heavens lit up with whirling stars, and a bilious incredible day supplanted night. But he had his balance, at least, and grabbed the solidity of Trumble, driving him back in an imperfect but potent rugby tackle, the kind which the brothers of his boyhood would have considered a poor substitute to real sportsmanship. A short, half-smothered punch against his ear brought further foul comets into Darragh’s vision. He began to pummel Trumble’s kidney area, and stood up and reeled off one good blow against Trumble’s left cheek. Even so concussed, he knew that this was not the Christian martyrs’ way, to try to oppose one’s own lions to the lions of the tyrant. The true way was to open one’s breast to the claws, but Darragh could not manage it. He threw another truncated and worthy punch into the soft and—as he thought of it—beery flesh near Trumble’s spine, where a rare area of flabbiness absorbed it and robbed it of some meaning. Then he pulled himself away and brought a short, satisfactory blow on Trumble’s ear. But the man’s forehead, fair, steely and dense, descended on Darragh’s temple and proclaimed another brief, vicious, sickly day.
At that moment of pain, his anger departed. It occurred to him to ask what he was doing, brawling in a street, after hotel-closing, outside a dead woman’s house. It means I must now take what he gives, Darragh concluded. Dull and vivid blows one after another. I am at last submissive, he declared to himself, with the faintest glow of pleasure and a larger fear of coming impacts.
But some ministers of mercy were all at once there, holding him firmly by the shoulder, dragging Trumble off, and crying, ‘Hang on! Whoa there! What the bloody hell!’ Once he knew he was safe from further blows, he could tell at once these two men were plain-clothes policemen. They wore the suit, differentiated only by minutiae of pattern, which Inspector Kearney wore. They wore the same hat from Anthony Hordern’s. Darragh saw the younger of the two men give Trumble a very effective crack across the back of the head, involving not just the fist but the forearm as well, and delivered with the laziness of long practice. ‘What the fuck are you doing, Trumble? Beating up priests now? You ought to be fucking interned, you prick. Sorry, Father. Pardon my French.’
They were all saying that these days, all the profaners mild and heroic, even poor old Bert Flood. In this case, Darragh lacked the breath to forgive the policeman’s French.
The older policeman told Trumble he was on a warning, he was watched, he was to go home. He ought to keep a bag packed too, because bastards like him could be interned any second. Just as well old Joe Stalin was on our side now, the younger suited cop remarked. Only thing that saved Trumble’s rotten blood bacon. ‘Unless you want to prefer charges, do you, Father?’
Darragh found the breath twice to say no. The older copper said he thought that was wise in these circumstances.
‘What circumstances?’ Trumble challenged.
‘Well,’ said the younger policeman, nodding towards Kate Heggarty’s house.
‘I didn’t see him come out of there,’ said Trumble, showing his solidarity with Darragh against the police.
‘Don’t argue with the bastard, Cliff. Haul off to buggery, Trumble.’
Trumble gathered his limbs, disordered by conflict, and began to slouch homeward up The Crescent. Still living with Bert Flood, it seemed. Broth
ers in lost love, of one kind or another.
Darragh, breathing, sore in the head but subject to no more false flashes of light, concluded the detectives wanted to get rid of Trumble because he did not hold any real interest for them. With him, their manner had been that of schoolteachers who subjected a bad student casually and daily to their contempt. But they found him, Darragh, more interesting, he surmised. ‘Do you have a car here, Father?’ asked the older policeman.
‘I was just out for a walk,’ said Darragh. It was so obvious—he knew from all the Saturday afternoon matinees that the murderer always returned. He could see in the older policeman’s eye that this must be a valid principle, since there was a meaningfulness, and he turned to swap that meaningfulness with the younger policeman. Both of them were older than he was, and wise according to their way.
They said they had been keeping a watch on number 23, Mrs Heggarty’s house. Indeed, their car was obvious now, under the embankment. Of course, given that the guilty did return, the police would keep their vigil, just as in the films. How could he have felt so unobserved? ‘We saw you go in, Father.’
Both men then introduced themselves to him with a careful, wooden etiquette. The older policeman Soames, the younger Blainey. Darragh could tell instantly from a particular kind of incomprehension the secular always showed that they were not Catholics. There was no malice to it, rather a sort of wary astonishment. Priests were so used to seeing such manners in those who were not of the Faith, that some older clerics said you could tell, from the sanctifying grace in the eyes, who was and wasn’t a Catholic. But to Darragh it was all a quirk of perception. Catholics knew how to fit a priest into the landscape. Others did not.
Soames asked him, ‘Why did you go to number 23, Father?’ Again a little incredulity in the father, arising in a man of perhaps fifty years who found himself calling a man of twenty-seven, bruised and in a cardigan, by that strange and potent honorific.
At once it was apparent, as pain faded, that there were no reasons that could be expressed to a plain-clothes policeman. A sort of wisdom told him to be frank.
‘She was a parishioner of mine. I came to pray for her soul.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Soames. ‘But you could have done that in the church.’
‘At Mass. And in the church. That’s right,’ said Darragh.
‘Do you usually come to the house of a dead person to pray?’
‘Sometimes before their death. Sometimes after.’
‘Yes,’ said Soames, in a deadly neutral way. ‘But you’re not wearing vestments or any … you don’t have your collar …’
‘No. The truth is the monsignor would probably not want me to have come. But I wanted to pay tribute …’
‘So you dressed as if you were just going out on a stroll?’
Darragh shrugged, conceding the point.
‘But what did you think you’d find there?’ asked Soames, his jaws blue even in this light beneath the brim of his hat, from the daily struggle between thorough shaving and the contrary force of his masculinity.
‘I just don’t know,’ Darragh confessed. He engaged, by preference, Blainey’s eyes. ‘I felt so sorry for her. Her husband was taken prisoner. I doubt I can put it into so many words. I wish I could. Obviously.’ He shrugged again, but they both waited for him to annotate what he had already said. ‘When something like this happens, I feel anger against the man who did it. I feel disappointment that I was not able to … well, somehow prevent it. Find a better path.’ That sounded pious, he thought; in a way the average Australian policeman would not like.
‘That’s in your statement to Inspector Kearney,’ Soames announced, almost as a request for something newer.
Darragh said, ‘I can’t tell you anything further, Mr Soames.’
‘You didn’t interfere with anything in there, did you?’ asked Blainey.
‘No.’
‘Did you go inside the house?’
‘It was locked.’
‘Do you have a key?’
‘No. No.’ What a concept for them to favour—that he’d creep the vacated rooms! But they were right. If he’d had a key, he would have.
‘You’re sure you don’t have a key, sir,’ said Soames, suspending Darragh’s clerical title until he was sure about this.
‘I don’t. I would have told Inspector Kearney.’
Soames said, ‘It’s not good though, for a priest to be prowling around an empty house like that. Cliff and I are experienced fellows, Father. And all our experience says it’s not a good idea, you being here like this. There are enough … what would you call them? … enough little items running between you and Mrs Heggarty. I’m sure you know more ignorant fellows than Blainey and I might draw an unwarranted conclusion.’
Darragh was weary enough, ashamed enough, unsatisfied enough to tell them to draw whatever conclusion they chose. But he said nothing. More ignorant fellows were welcome to draw their unwarranted conclusions.
‘We’d take you home,’ Soames offered, ‘but we won’t be relieved for another hour.’
Of course, Darragh insisted he was happy to walk home. His delivery by police car would have confirmed the monsignor’s desperate sense that he had on his hands a rogue curate. And the monsignor would soon enough hear of this encounter outside number 23 from Kearney, his brother on the secular level, a kinsman in enviable, shared worldliness. Darragh nodded to number 23 and said, ‘I was just hoping to pick up …’ But he was as inadequate as earlier at describing what. ‘That it happened … that’s what I can’t believe.’
Blainey said, ‘Yes. Look, you’d better get cracking, Father.’
Darragh had nothing further to say and turned to go. Soames called out to him. ‘Sometimes these things are done by blokes who have pretty straightforward ideas. Anger gives men and women strength you wouldn’t believe.’
Kearney had argued the same way. But Darragh had nothing wise to utter in response, except another muttered goodnight. And so he turned back, a shadow in a cardigan, priest, brawler, disbeliever in Kate Heggarty’s death, through streets where almost from house after house he could hear the performance of a yodeller on The Amateur Hour. Amateur hour. He had just provided it.
AFTER SAYING EARLY Mass for the repose of souls and capture of the guilty, he had a train to catch at a quarter past eight to make the connection at Central with the half-past-nine down the coast. The monsignor had his own Mass to say at eight o’clock, and Darragh met him briefly while divesting in the sacristy, as the monsignor tied his cincture.
‘Monsignor, I have to tell you. I went to Mrs Heggarty’s place last night. The police found me. I’m sorry about that.’ As Darragh spoke, the monsignor’s face sagged and his skull beneath his strands of hair took on the seamless hue of exhausted anger.
‘I’m sorry for all the embarrassment to you. But it’s a shock, isn’t it, to find one of your penitents has been strangled …’
‘She wasn’t penitent, that’s the point.’ A suspicion entered the monsignor’s eye. ‘Are you going to Kangaroo Valley?’
‘Yes. This morning.’
The monsignor exhaled. ‘You had better come back a changed man, Frank.’
The monsignor had had the grace to whisper, but the altar boys were beginning to sense his fury and to listen in. The monsignor put his lips close to Darragh’s ear. ‘I hate it that I can’t predict what you’ll do, Frank.’
‘I hate it too, Monsignor.’
For this morning, after a little early reflection, he could see the fallacy of his behaviour. He had been wrong-headed enough, he confessed to himself, to think that to be a fool for Christ was better than to be wise after the manner of this earth. But he had tried to bring that trick off last night, and it had been a catastrophe. It seemed an outrageous vanity to believe that by breathing in the air of number 23’s side lane and backyard, he could achieve more wisdom. And if he were set on being a fool, why try to explain himself away as a rational fellow to two policemen? You could not act on
some ill-advised fervour and then expect sensible men and women to accept your explanation for it, so that you were left justifying yourself, in the darkness of The Crescent, like a high-school debater.
Before he left for Strathfield Station, he wrote a long note for Mrs Flannery. If an American chaplain called, would she kindly tell him that Father Darragh had been unexpectedly called away, and would telephone him as soon as he could. Imperilled Gervaise would have to wait Darragh’s return.
Changing trains at Central, he went up long stairs to the country platforms, where it seemed a thousand soldiers were bidding goodbye to tribes of women and infants. Thousands of tales here too, of loyalty and folly, and if he could absorb them all, perhaps he could compete with the monsignor and Sergeant Kearney for being wise according to the manner of this earth.
The war itself and the fields of peril were, however, north and north-west, so there were hardly any soldiers and no dramatic tension on Darragh’s southward train, with its old-fashioned third-class carriages and its unglamorous number 34 engine, the pony of iron horses. Darragh recited his office with the new energy of a self-declared parish clown. But as he read his way through the small hours of Prime, Terce, Sext, None, he was prey again to the idea that as much as he might have discomfited the monsignor and incurred the attention of an appropriately vigilant police, he had by his indefinite mission to number 23 kept faith with Mrs Heggarty. This was in its way both a welcome and a disturbing suspicion. It seemed to compel him to further acts of foolishness and disobedience.
Beyond the window, southern Sydney factories, having rusted in the Depression, looked newly redeemed by war. Girls in overalls wore business-like scarves on their heads, the kind Mrs Heggarty had worn the day Darragh had visited her for tea, as they walked from one dismal industrial hangar to another. By Vespers, a vivid blue Pacific could be seen to the left. The train was rolling south of Cronulla, ascending the sandstone plateau of low scrub with wonderful mountains a little off to the west. Vast places. How could the Japanese credibly claim every square inch of this? The British had, some one hundred and fifty years before, and yet when you saw the scale of things, the coastal valleys, the ranges, the breadth of the earth beyond, the idea that possession could be asserted seemed hard to believe. If the cities fell, he imagined, these mountains would harbour rebels, exactly as in the Philippines. There were in Poland, so the news came sporadically, resistance groups with priests. He was taken by the allure, the grand, moral simplicity of such a life. The Japanese though, unless he found his sure voice, would probably shoot him while he was still explaining himself, and make him an irrelevant contributor to any dissent from their world order.