1915

by Roger McDonald

  “How about him?”

  “He’s quiet,” said Potty after taking a look. “Shall we pray?”

  Walter shrugged, and stared at the floor to avoid the man’s poached egg eyes. “Our Father …”

  There was something collusive about the way Potty administered his treatment for the pangs of war. It was equally military in purpose to the sounding of the retreat at sunset, those moments when the bugle offered with its melodious Come Home! Come Home! Come Home! an illusion of wholeness at the end, when all along the motive was to restore and fling lives back into the fray.

  “I’ll go to him,” said Mr Fox when Frank gave a sudden cry. He placed a restraining hand on Walter’s knee, and smiled, quizzical this time on the brink of recognition. Then it struck Walter that the oddness in the minister’s eyes was nothing more than the bewildered and nervous look of a man who had mislaid his glasses. Could it be that simple? Walter cursed what he saw as a limitation that prevented him from adhering to the surface of things, which had him bounding always from the cosmic to the underground. He cursed this as unsteadiness, but an overactive imagination has its rewards. Watching the minister at work Walter developed a sense of being a spectator at the play of his own fate. This was horrible, but also absorbing. It was as if his life had become a three dimensional performance wherein feeling as well as action were available to himself-as-onlooker: the carved, flesh-coloured figures part of a fascinating, enigmatic drama of the world that illumined, inevitably, the enigmas of the self.

  Thus curiosity calmed him, and with its callous power, healed.

  Mr Fox unrolled a stained white surplice and knelt at Frank’s side. Like an ineptly slaughtered animal Frank refused to die, but gasped and tensed.

  “Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to His church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great mercy forgive thee thine offences,” — Frank’s moans had earned him this sermon — “and by the authority committed unto me, I absolve thee from all thy sins in the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost amen.”

  A conversation ensued, declining sounds and searching fingertips on one side, words on the other. Frank was being attended to by the real article now and he must have realized, for Potty signalled Walter to come closer.

  “He wants you to give a message to someone called Nugget.”

  “Wally?” The name dribbled from Frank’s lips. Inch by inch he once again forced out the instructions relating to Marge and Mossie.

  “I’ll tell him.”

  At least there, at the bitter end, Mr Fox’s role appeared substantial. Not just a military appendage, but a manifestation of love. “Lo, I am with you always,” he murmured, “even unto the end of the world.”

  Wide-eyed now, Frank faced the two of them and groped (it seemed) through the loneliness of pain and shock for sympathy and confidence. Frank the lover … If only this straining in the gloom led to a hotel rooftop, and the hand in yours, Frank, belonged to the girl with the impassive face and lustrous eyes. “The eternal arms of God’s love are about you,” said Mr Fox, and repeated the assurance many times as if performing an act of mesmerism. “Don’t you feel the grip of Christ’s pierced hands? The Christ who has been through it all Himself.” He leaned forward and blocked Walter’s view. When he shifted back Frank’s eyes were still. Mr. Fox hestitantly made the sign of the cross, then recited loudly and firmly: “Unto God’s gracious mercy and protection we commit you. The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you, and give you His peace, now and for evermore.”

  When Walter stood (still wearing his hat) he found others around him— Potty had known they were there, and these final words were meant for their ears, an impromptu service to which they muttered a rough “Amen”: Boof, Walter Madox, Bluey. Potty took Walter by the elbow and said: “I’ll write to your dear parents and tell them you’re safe and well.”

  “If you like.”

  Walter had been moved at the end, but no longer by the drawn out death of Frank. The warm and huge tear that tickled his cheek and dipped to leak saltily across his lips had been for the words, for the emotion sentimentally stirred by language, and for his own lost selves flaking away and away into the past (brief panicked lives: mice fleeing the harvester). The latest self had become on the instant indifferent to the sight of death, but not to ceremonies for the dead.

  “What is it, then?” The minister poised a pencil over his notebook. He had asked Bluey as well:

  “Mrs A.T. Clarke, Full Moon Flat, via Mookerawa — but I ain’t religious. Does it matter that I’m not christened?” Bluey twisted a handkerchief, shy and defiant.

  When Mr Fox turned to Walter it was clear that even now he did not recognize him. The offer to write to his parents was another of those quick charitable duties that a chaplain held ready to fit anyone, like a field dressing.

  “You know who I am,” prompted Walter sheepishly.

  “From the college?”

  “From Mt Cookapoi.” Walter removed his hat and ran a hand through old bedsprings of hair.

  After the “of-courses” and “how-could-I’s” Mr Fox confessed that he needed sleep, rubbed his eyes (Bluey fetched a pint of tea), smacked his palms and asked was it not with feelings of strange and fearsome delight that they at last found themselves “up against it”?

  All Walter’s phantoms of survival ran away and hid their faces. “Yes,” he said, gripping his mug, “It’s like starting the ‘hundred’.”

  “I’m fully alive here,” confided the minister. Musingly he said: “‘He steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem’ … I suppose I joined up as a kind of personal test. Even ministers have their personal crises, you know …”

  There was something of the old madness in the way he stared across the rim of his mug — as once he had stared toward a Sunday horizon of glare and stubble. This effect became marked when he found his glasses and wedged them onto the bony bridge of his nose.

  “Ah,” he exclaimed, and examined their faces.

  Walter Madox handed across a piece of paper containing his name and address.

  “What about you?” the minister asked Boof.

  “There’s no-one. Just me.”

  “My great regret is leaving the wife and little daughter behind,” said the minister, addressing the words to Boof who looked sour.

  Suddenly an idea was in the air. “I wonder if you two could help me. Wait here.” The chaplain dashed off to find Captain Naylor.

  “If there’s one type I can’t stand it’s the parson,” said Boof. “I’ve never met one who wasn’t out to make a bloke feel a fool just for being alive.”

  “When they act like one of us,” agreed Bluey, “you feel they’ve no right. And when they’re all fired up with God and Christ, what’s that to do with a bloke?”

  The chaplain returned with Charlie Bushel to say it was all arranged. Walter and Bluey had been detailed to help him in some hard but rewarding work. They were to go with a bearer at dusk to a point called Waterfall Gully where two tracks met below the trench, and there rendezvous at a sort of tent flap. After Potty left, Charlie with a grin told them that the tent flap was the morgue. He said he hoped they had their undertaker’s tickets.

  17

  Chloride of Lime

  It was dark when they set off. The stars were blurred as though smeared on thick oiled glass, and they crouched, making their guide impatient, fearing a shattering hammer blow. But as they slithered deeper down they realized that the snipers of a few nights before had ceased operating, and excitedly they tasted freedom by standing upright. On a sharp corner, plunging into a herb bush, Bluey filled his pockets with crushed stalks.

  They found Potty at work with an electric torch, his fingers partly enclosing the glass, causing light to fan in pink blades across the faces of the dead. Six corpses lay in a row awaiting Indian bearers who would hoist them on stretchers down to the less steep part of the valley,
and from there convey them in mule carts to the cemetery.

  “Which is Frank?” The light picked him out.

  “The dead are expressionless, aren’t they,” said Potty. “They’ve exhausted the range of feeling.”

  Decomposition had not yet set in. Under low canvas in the furtive light the faces were like stone knights in a makeshift tomb.

  “They don’t look rested,” said Bluey. “What is it about them faces?”

  “Here come the Sikhs,” said Potty. A garbled phrase rose from below, followed by a ripple of dislodged gravel, and then silence. Bluey swung his rifle to the side and then to the front in case of a Turkish patrol. Potty laughed at the thought: “Our men are all round.”

  Suddenly a huge figure loomed from the darkness above. Bluey’s rifle, in another charge of nerves, banged Walter’s kneecap.

  “Jesus!”

  “It’s Doherty,” said Potty. The announcement, though edged with exasperation, was also a greeting. A giant materialized holding one end of a stretcher from which he tipped, cruelly, a badly wounded man.

  “We found this here Injun up in the scrub. I think he’s just about to kick the bucket, he’s been shot clean through the guts. You’d better tell him about God.”

  The Sikh seemed indifferent to Potty’s close study of his face, and with good reason: “He’s dead already.”

  “Let’s push on down,” Doherty said to his mate.

  Walter and Bluey stacked the dead man beside the rest. Neither spoke. The corpse was lighter than a wheat bag by far, but clumsily balanced, which made it hard for Walter to think of the task as part of a day’s work, which was the mental trick he had determined to perform to overcome revulsion at touching dead bodies. At school the juniors had once staged a rebellion in the locker room, throwing themselves in a pile and refusing to move. The seniors had been given the job of peeling the inert forms clear and lugging them outside. But these boots in his hands never kicked, and the turbanless head of greasy hair dangling between Bluey’s shins neither twisted nor butted.

  They were catching their breath when Doherty’s voice flew up through the darkness. “Hey, Rev! There’s another Injun down here keeps asking for wine. Have you got anything to drink?”

  They scrambled down the path and found a bearer doubled over holding his stomach. He had slipped from the track and hauled himself up again. The wound was black, perhaps a day old.

  “You damn fool,” said Potty, “he’s trying to tell you to wind a bandage around his wound.” The Sikh burial party arrived as Potty pulled a clean dressing from his pocket. He applied it with steady hands while Walter cupped the torch. Then he sent the Sikhs on up the hill while Walter and Bluey hitched the wounded man between them and dropped into the black pool of the valley, lurching like competitors in a three-legged race.

  Down at the carts they found themselves in a place resembling a mining camp. Here were ammunition boxes, planks, rolls of wire, empty water containers, and men, hollow-eyed clumps of wounded, some wedged into the hillside where eroded slits had been chipped wider, others carelessly dumped in the open. A few slept, but most stared with the wide eyes of nocturnal creatures. The healthy laboured. Everything — men, materials, even the dead — seemed destined for service in an underworld where a nameless ore of frantic value was to be found, and the mine was hereabouts, testified the haunted labourers, though no-one knew exactly where.

  Potty took a breather after finding a doctor for the Sikh, and sprawled with Walter in the dust exchanging impressions of home. Mr Fox had not liked Parkes, it was too open after his South Australian hill country. An argument developed with Bluey umpiring. All that Walter loved the minister hated: frozen puddles in winter, low clouds of guncotton blue bowling up from the south, and the summer furnace that glaringly struck distant vistas out of existence. He would mention no names, but also the people, the congregation, had not been kind to him. “Your parents are fine folk,” he said politely. But Walter knew that they too had given the minister only the average regard.

  Coming down the hill Walter had changed his mind about Mr Fox. His desperate care to manoeuvre the Sikh without needless hurt, the way he poured kindly phrases into the dark man’s ear and drawled “Of course you are” when the fellow, stung by pain, had cried “Bill cool tucker-ah, Sahib” (or something) which Potty said meant “Quite fit” — add to this the memory of Frank clawing at his precipice of life while Potty worked to hold him there — indeed everything Potty had done this day (when Walter put it in a new light) seemed bravely set against the values of these few square miles of butchery. Even his position as a brace to hold men ready for military death, while very real, was an accidental side effect of his gift of love. And his directness and simplicity, like everything else about him, showed he was no longer the subtle madman.

  So Walter blurted a complaint to the new man about the old:

  “I always had trouble with your sermons.”

  “As I did myself.”

  “No — my fault — they were above my head.”

  “And often above mine. It was a confused time. If only I could go back now, back to a pulpit. I don’t think I was a Christian then.”

  “Are you now?” asked Bluey.

  “The Christian truth is bedrock. Such a simple lesson to come from pain.” Tiredly accepting a suck from Walter’s pipe he repositioned himself on a stack of empty sandbags and confessed: “Mind you, I was no stranger to pain before. It’s just that I failed when I tried to apply faith to the intellect, rather than to the world … You’ve changed!” he suddenly switched his attention and poked Walter in the ribs.

  “Have I?”

  “I couldn’t see the thinker. Haven’t you rid yourself of more than a touch of self-satisfaction?”

  “He’s always brooding about something,” pronounced Bluey.

  “The outer man must be cultivated. Can I have some more of that pipe? Poetry is a deceit.”

  “How come you didn’t recognize me before?”

  The minister launched into a sermon. But here the dusty words were lapped around by objects that gave them force. “Change has altered us all. Don’t you care more about others now? The army demonstrates that all of us are linked, even enemies. But so does Christ.”

  “I can’t tell,” muttered Walter. But something heartening had been said. Potty had gone as it were ahead of him, taunting with analysis an as yet undeveloped cast of character, and by such a means … creating it. The cloud of self was desperate for highlights.

  Bluey was bored. “When do we get started?” He struck matches, lighting up the minister’s face between them.

  “Soon. I need a rest. They don’t train men of the cloth for the outdoors.” Mr Fox outlined his usual night’s routine: a round of the hospital tents near the beach, then back to the gully for funerals. He called them “funerals” as if everyone turned up, when in truth for the past few nights he had been the only one in attendance, an unseen, unheard figure rolling bodies into a trench, intoning a few ancient words, looping identity discs on the necks of crosses, then back to his dugout on the heights at two or three in the morning.

  Bluey strolled to a donkey and felt over it from teeth to tail for quality. Walter found the inactivity wonderfully refreshing. His agonized self-questioning did not seem so wasteful after all. The past few days of fear and panic had been half in alarm at the imminent destruction of an incomplete self. Now here was Potty Fox telling him that the self was never incomplete: never quite. It even seemed possible that he would escape into the future, for here was a man of faith blithely assuming that a future existed.

  “What will you do after the war?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The farm?”

  “No.”

  “Won’t your father expect you back?”

  “I wanted to be a geologist. Now I don’t know.” Walter scanned his prospects and saw something unseen before. “I might have a go at becoming a journalist. I’ve got a friend, Ollie Melrose, who se
nds things off to the papers. They never publish them.” He then ventured an innocently vain opinion that later was to cause trouble: “I think I could do better.”

  “You should keep a diary.”

  “Here? I’ve done nothing important.”

  “Have you considered the church?”

  “Cut it out!”

  “You should give it some thought. Especially now you’ve been as deep as a man can go.”

  Potty had not understood him after all. Suddenly it all seemed bullshit again. But Walter found something to add, a blatant unfurling of ambition:

  “Art.” The word flew straight from Egypt, from the mosque. So somehow his dreams were mixed up in religion, and perhaps that was what Potty saw … Potty who now glanced peculiarly at him:

  “Paints?”

  But he could not explain, suddenly wouldn’t, because with shock he realized that it was not Egypt after all that lay at the root of his budding ideas, but Frances. She had talked on and on about art and he had only half listened. The words since then had been percolating insidiously upwards until, needing to build a new soul to oust her, he had spilled her ideas out in a stream coloured as his own. He was nothing but a drab skull of echoes. And worse, he was still bonded insanely to her.

  “Doesn’t it sicken you? How can you go on?” And then with vehemence, taking it out on the Reverend Potty Fox, slapping him with bitterness and a prescience of his own widening failure to grasp anything: “Reg Hurst’s dead!”

  He watched the minister’s face while the announcement clanged around this furtively lamplit compound. His face (Walter now realized) was younger than Bluey’s who was twenty-seven. It was too unweathered to bear its burden of personal history. “I’m sorry,” Walter muttered, “sorry for doing my block.”

  Plainly the news was no surprise, though he said (and Walter believed him), “I hadn’t heard.” He made no attempt to ask how Walter knew about Hurst, alive or dead, but calmly accepted that both should know him.