by Tom Keneally
‘Okay,’ Fratelli agreed, but he was not convinced. ‘Now, no question I do my own sinning, but when I was a boy, I was misused by an older woman, and terrible things were let loose. In an army in peacetime, you find plenty of guys with demons. The Corps of Military Police meets up with them in the stockade. Broken souls. At nineteen years, it’s already too late to go back and untangle their lines. I feel a lot of anger when I see how like me they are. And how like I am to them.’
Darragh’s instincts were against such an over-elaborated confession as Fratelli was making. He tried to get the man to the point. ‘So you’re confessing rage?’
‘That’s right. Rage.’
‘Against prisoners? Or others?’
‘Prisoners figure in it.’
‘Do you inflict blows?’
‘Yes. Them too.’
In silence, Darragh waited. He imagined bruised and contused jaws. ‘I have sat at desks while men hanged themselves,’ Fratelli continued at last. ‘Sometimes it seemed to me a wise thing they did. I have given niggers in the stockade what they need to end things.’
Here, to Darragh’s sudden outrage, was evidence for Gervaise’s view of the world. ‘How do you mean?’ Darragh asked nonetheless.
‘A man who wants can hang himself with a cut-up handtowel. If he’s ambitious for it, he can do it with shoelaces or rosaries.’
So the foundations had shifted. Captain O’Rourke, as officer and priest, declared such tales apocryphal. Had O’Rourke never heard the confession of a prison guard?
‘How often did this happen?’ asked Darragh, fearing the answer, pleased that Gervaise was out of these hands, but alarmed he might be in ones of similar intentions.
Fratelli seemed, beneath the aegis of the angel he had invoked, to be counting. ‘Five, maybe six times. You can’t have too many prisoners die on your watch. But niggers—the army goes along easy with the idea coloureds hang themselves in prison. And the more who do it, the more the figures prove it.’
This was not the normal mumbling of a sheltered young man of scruples. Did all Americans make their confessions as fulsomely as this? Maybe they were told in childhood not to shilly-shally in front of the confessional grille. It had to be counted, too, that the parishioners he absolved were chiefly of Irish, Scottish or English descent, and had a more reticent, more stuttering nicety of guilt than Fratelli.
‘This is a very serious matter. For you. For your superiors.’ It was serious for Gervaise too.
‘I did mention demons,’ Fratelli pleaded.
‘But it can’t all be blamed on demons, can it? Your free will was involved.’
The penitent seemed to contemplate this and then concede the point. ‘My free will runs to ruin. It chooses the bad from the bad.’
‘But if you think that way all the time, then you expect to sin. You shouldn’t expect to sin. You shouldn’t think it can’t be avoided.’
‘But there are people round me who know too much about me. What people know of you is what you become.’
Is that true? Darragh was tempted to consider. It sounded true.
‘Other MPs?’ he asked.
‘Other MPs,’ Fratelli agreed. ‘And other dangerous people in general.’
‘You might have to stand up to them,’ said Darragh. ‘Defy their power over you. I’m not asking the impossible. But history is full of people who have stood up. They get mocked … It’s a small price.’
Fratelli laughed, without any viciousness, but in a way that showed he thought mockery would be the least that would befall him should he desist from helping black men hang themselves.
‘You’re not talking about Private Aspillon?’
‘Not that one. All the coloureds got shipped to North Queensland. He’s not the question, that particular nigger of yours.’
‘When Gervaise and I were together in that shed … did you want us both killed?’
Fratelli answered with some passion. ‘I wanted you to learn a lesson. I wanted you to see the size of things. You’ll see there were reasons I wanted to bring you to size. You were already in my sights.’ Fratelli seemed to writhe within his suit. Body and fabric could be heard shifting. ‘Be patient. You’ll see.’
What would Father Anselm think of this, with his moment-by-moment theory? Darragh did not know what to make of it but horror.
He said, ‘If you’re really willing to amend, then I can absolve you of these sins. Even if you don’t think you’ve got the strength, the desire to behave well is reinforced by what happens here, by the sacrament. The grace you need is not fully in your possession yet. You’ll receive it with absolution, the grace to be a genuinely brave man. And you can stand up to them. If you can stand up to me … I can’t complain that your confession hasn’t been full and frank … then you can stand up to them.’
‘But I’m not finished yet,’ Fratelli assured him. ‘I had you say a Mass for my aunt. Speak no ill of the dead, but she needed one. A married woman, and me thirteen or fourteen, getting at me in the empty pickers’ huts at the back of the orchard. Making a man of me.’
Darragh wanted this torrent of confessed misuse to end. His vanity as a confessor had kept him in place late enough for Fratelli to arrive and begin pouring these poisons in his ear.
‘Are you saying you and your aunt …?’
‘I didn’t think I was used badly at the time. She was proud of me, I was proud of myself. She said, “I’d never find a boy like you among the skinny Protestants. Beside them, an Italian boy is a man.” So you see, I had my full issue of pride before a fall. I didn’t know anything. I was a straitlaced boy and I didn’t know. And I was glad she was not a whore, and proud that she was older and saw me as a man, better than my uncle. “You’re a better man than your uncle,” she told me, and I was as proud as Satan. And for her I was a better man. In the sense she wanted.’
‘You’ve surely confessed this in the past,’ Darragh suggested hopefully.
Fratelli said, ‘That’s right. It’s old stuff in a way.’
‘And so it’s forgiven. Unless there’s something in it you go back to, or let influence you now.’
‘There’s an influence,’ Fratelli admitted. ‘She messed me for normal women. I was a man only for her. I was her man and never became anyone else’s. I don’t like whores. Whores are an abomination. I always thought so. I always wanted a decent woman. But I had no interest in kids my age. I wasn’t interested in courting a Catholic girl, some lettuce-grower’s daughter. When my aunt was praising me, I thought, watch out, you girls! Proud, you know. I thought I’d find a peach, a pearl. Easy work. But girls were nothing to me. It was married women, and women who looked married, like my aunt. I liked women with husbands and kids, women who’d been used and were kind of sad. Those who weren’t left me ice-cold. But even now when I meet the sort of women I like, I’ve got the full intention to do the adultery. But I can’t make it work. Punishment, you see, for my old pride as a kid.’
Darragh shook his head. ‘So, you have tried to have indecent relations with married women, but have been unable to?’ he asked, wanting to move things along.
‘That’s true for the large part,’ said Fratelli. True for the large part … Nothing was straightforward true for this man. He could keep me here for hours, Darragh thought in panic. He asked, ‘Have you seen a doctor?’
Fratelli was a little amused in a brotherly way. ‘Do you want a doctor to help me become the perfect fornicator?’
‘I’d want you to marry, normally.’
‘Normally,’ conceded Fratelli. ‘I wouldn’t mind that myself.’
To reach a conclusion, Darragh found himself speaking of the Blessed Virgin, the image of womanhood. She wanted his happiness, Darragh assured Fratelli. Many men of perverse tendency had been helped to a normal life by faith in her powers of intercession with her son. Darragh, of course, did not know this from any experience, but he believed it absolutely, even in his present numb state.
Fratelli could not be dissuaded fr
om further unnecessary explanations. ‘I don’t court women like a barbarian. I’m slow. I’m kind. I take care. I say gentle and tender things you would not expect of a rough soldier. I don’t parade my uniform, never have. I dress like an ordinary Joe in an ordinary job. I am thoughtful of her children—though I want the woman, I know that this can be a hard thing for the child. For the way the child sees the mother, that’s what I mean. I’m as scared as the woman that the child might see us doing something wrong. The woman is frightened of that too, but not as frightened as I am. I’m the one that’s got good reason to be frightened. The woman meets me, and I’m as edgy as she is about what might happen. I’m as careful. Women aren’t used to this. They’re used to oafs blundering up, wanting them straight off.’
‘All you tell me,’ said Darragh, further and further out of his depth, ‘confirms you have a good heart.’
‘You don’t know yet where I’m taking you. Anyhow, I don’t visit often, I visit at discreet times. And as I said, dressed like a guy who works in a store somewhere. A guy in a cheap suit. Kind of threadbare and respectable. Grey or blue with little pinstripes. No two-tone shoes. Some dead guy’s tie, bought in a secondhand shop. The dust of years in it. I’m so sincere, I’m pretty much invisible. I do this not so that people won’t remember me, though that’s often the case, I look like some Polack factory hand. I do it for her, too. I don’t preen. I say, this is all I am, a poor motherless child. So I kind of fall in love the normal way. I think it’s the normal way. She’s married, but her husband is away, working on a dam somewhere, or drilling for oil, or in the navy.’
With a tremor in his throat, Darragh said, ‘Or serving in New Guinea or Africa …’
‘I’m talking about my old life, in the States. Fort Ord, Camp Bullis, Fort Bragg. I’ve been ten years in the service.’ Fear of what was imminent prevented Darragh from commending the earnestness, the care for avoiding scandal, in Fratelli’s courtship methods. At the heart of lust there was meant to be no redeeming courtliness. ‘I tell myself this is genuine love that I feel, and that, like they say, love conquers all. I’m behaving well. I even feel noble. I’m able to imagine what it’ll be like when she and I say at last yes, and I get excited like a normal man, and want no other woman on earth. I even want her to leave her husband. I begin to talk to her about it before we’ve even done a thing.’
He considerately paused, in case Darragh wanted to annotate the issues raised to this stage. But Darragh had nothing to say, for Fratelli evaded all the skills of the confessor.
So the sergeant continued. ‘Some night—or some daytime if the kid’s at school—it comes. And this is perfect. This is a perfect union. No unwillingness in the woman—we’re both past unwilling. She gives herself up. The one problem is, I can’t give myself up. My aunt reaches out from the pickers’ quarters, and I smell the smell of the place, and I’m done for. I’m part of a terrible greyness. I’ve died, I’m gone. This good woman lies there with a corpse, a rotting thing. Me. She knows it, and I can’t begin to tolerate that she knows all this about me, that she sees me rotting like this. She’s full of fear. She’s sacrificed honour. For this? To lie with the dead?’
‘You must see a doctor,’ Darragh told him. A doctor might be the least of it.
‘I must see a doctor,’ Fratelli agreed. ‘But at the time I’m not within reach of a doctor. Before I know, I’ve reached out and crushed her breath out of her. I save myself. I save her as fast and furious as I can. I manage, dear God, to crank off like a schoolboy. I put my suit back on, and I close the door and leave my saved love behind.’
Darragh, who had had rage for the imagined murderer, felt mere exhaustion now. ‘You are in the greatest danger,’ he said. Which was absurd.
‘It happened three times in the States. Three angels I made and released from their own disgust. Only three. I don’t go round talking to every woman I meet.’
‘And one in Australia,’ said Darragh with his dreadful certainty.
‘An angel in Australia,’ Fratelli assented.
‘Don’t you dare say angel!’ Darragh, overtaken now by the appropriate fury, told him. ‘I forbid you.’
‘It’s the way I think,’ Fratelli murmured.
‘No. You say angel to excuse yourself. You’ve done nothing but excuse yourself throughout.’
Darragh was aware his voice was growing somewhat heightened for the confessional. But the confessional lightning had struck him. The very woman whose salvation he so actively desired was connected to this wretch whose salvation he needed now to countenance. This case always advanced in Moral Theology classes, in the section De Sacramentis. The murderer comes to the confessional grille, to the curtain where God’s omniscience begins, and the priest is left with the human knowledge of what has been savagely done. The confessor orders the killer to surrender himself—it is a condition of absolution that he should firmly intend to do so. The killer says he will, and the priest absolves him in the hope that the grace of the sacrament will fortify him for self-surrender to the state. But then the killer does not do so, reneges on the conditions of his absolution. When Dr Cleary, professor of moral theology, raised this issue, for some reason Darragh the student imagined an enclosed European village, sealed in by mountains, with the priest walking among gothic villagers, knowing they were endangered by the killer yet unable to tell them. As Darragh the student had imagined the scene, it had little to do with the suburbs of Sydney.
But it had happened to him and to those with whom he had broken the bread of heaven. It was not some alpine village of the kind he knew only from films set in Europe. It was a matter of these plain streets. A priest, whether in Homebush or in a mountain-girt Catholic village, could not break the seal of the confessional to save his life, to protect his good name, to refute a false accusation, to save the life of others, to aid the course of justice or to avert a public calamity. He was not bound by any oath in court when asked to reveal what was said in the confessional. A confessor who directly violated the seal of confession incurred an automatic excommunication, which only the Vatican could lift. The Fourth Lateran Council seven hundred years past had stated a sentiment Darragh was familiar with: ‘Let the confessor take absolute care not to betray the sinner through word or sign, or in any other way whatsoever …’ The Czech saint, St John Nepomucene, confessor to King Wenceslaus IV and to his queen, knew that the king was perverse in his sexual practice, and that the queen was utterly faithful to him. Wenceslaus tortured St John so that he might reveal the queen’s sins, and when he would not he was thrown into the river Moldava and drowned, dying to preserve the seal.
The other law which Darragh knew from his student days and now could recount to himself instinctively was that he could not even raise the matter with Fratelli outside the confessional, unless by some miracle, some quirk of his madness or guilt, Fratelli himself raised it.
Darragh heard himself tell Fratelli flatly that he must turn himself over to the authorities, and heard Fratelli answering in a reasonable, doleful voice.
Darragh shook his head. ‘What? What are you telling me?’
‘I said, I am the authorities,’ said Fratelli moderately, with the mildest sadness.
‘You are not an authority. You are the authority for nothing.’
‘Just now,’ Fratelli said reasonably, ‘you told me the grace of confession will help me not do any of this again. I wish never to do it again. But if I turn myself in, Father, I’ll be hanged.’
‘Don’t you think that just?’
‘Kind of just,’ Fratelli conceded.
‘You’ll do this dreadful thing again.’
‘Not if I pray.’
‘This is hopeless,’ said Darragh. ‘Will you release me from the seal of the confessional, so that I can talk to you about this, face to face?’
‘You can’t tell anybody else?’
‘No, I can talk only to you. In fact, if anyone else overheard us, they’d be bound to secrecy too. But nobody will overhear us.’<
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‘Father, I have a purpose to amend myself.’
Darragh shook his head. ‘When will we meet then?’
‘Why not outside?’ suggested Fratelli. ‘Now.’
For some reason this made Darragh furious. ‘Haven’t you got any shame at all?’
‘I have shame. And if you don’t speak to me gentle, Father, whoever will?’
‘I don’t know if I can do that yet. Speak gently, I mean.’
Fratelli said, ‘Maybe you’ll be given the grace to do it. If I can be, you sure can too.’
‘Stop this sophistry, for God’s own sake.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Fratelli. ‘All I understand is that I’m contrite.’
‘God forgive you,’ said Darragh, and then he absolved Fratelli of the crime of destroying Kate Heggarty. He imposed a penance of one whole rosary—the Joyful, Glorious and Sorrowful Mysteries—to be recited within the next twenty-four hours. It was such a fatuous penalty, Darragh thought, for the deaths by omission of Negroes, the deaths by commission of wives. He suspected that, after all, the sacrament of penance was not designed for such sins and Fratelli should have stayed, without approaching the confessional, in the habitation of the damned, some outer dark, awaiting capture.
By the time the stunned Darragh emerged thinking, Surely he has gone, it was full night. He looked automatically at his watch—it was only three-quarters of an hour before Saturday night Benediction, which meant a full church of people these anxious days. All attending to their contract with God: I will attend Benediction and Mass if you will let him live … If you make sure I die before him … If you give me a sign that he has gone to heaven … If you will turn the alien hosts away. God made no contracts, however. Except perhaps the long-term contract of redemption, longer running than the term set by the severest bank, the most avid insurance company.
He found Fratelli smoking calmly on the side steps of the church. The light in Mrs Flannery’s presbytery kitchen thinly blinked between blackout curtains. Darragh snatched the cigarette from his hand and ground it out against the pavement. He was aware, from this sudden contact, of the meatiness of Fratelli’s hand and thus, by implication, of the arm in which it ended. He took a step back in disgust.