Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Brother Cosmas takes an interest in Clement

  Each morning after play Mr Cotter leaves the room, and Brother Cosmas comes in to take the Christian Doctrine period in grade four. The brother’s dimpled girlish face and his gentle voice convince Killeaton that he has never taken enough interest in his religion. Listening to the brother talking about grace and holiness and prayers and Mass and the sacraments, Clement feels sure that he alone of all the boys in the class understands the true meaning of Christian Doctrine. He wonders whether he will ever have the chance to describe to Brother Cosmas the intricate patterns and compelling colours that come to his mind during Christian Doctrine lessons and for hours afterwards (an incandescent scarlet for the Sacred Heart, a green waterfall divided into three veil-like streams for the Blessed Trinity, a fierce orange for the Holy Ghost), his own private notion that every virtue corresponds to the colour of some precious stone and that its presence in the soul sets its special colour glowing against a background of sheer white, or the task that he has imposed on himself of laying out in his mind an elaborate garden, such as he once believed might lie behind the tall galvanised iron fence around the brothers’ own house until he started at the College and discovered behind the fence nothing more than an untidy circular lawn where a white plaster statue of Our Lady with indistinct features stared out at the grass and gravel around her, into whose concealed islands of lawn and remote trickling grottoes he might walk a little further whenever he said a silent prayer on the way to school or alone in his backyard. He soon becomes one of the brother’s favourites by answering questions correctly in a sweet girlish voice and by asking at the end of nearly every lesson the meaning of some ritual or Latin word in the Mass or of some strange phrase that he has read in his father’s missal. He begins to dislike a boy named Billy Malady who can produce a voice even more effeminate than his own and whose questions are so involved that Brother Cosmas often invites the boy to come around and ring the bell at the side of the brothers’ house after school and have an answer explained to him in detail. One day Brother Cosmas asks the class to tell him all the swear words that they know, so that he can warn them which are sinful and which are just plain vulgar. While other boys stand up and say bloody and bugger and bastard and try not to blush or laugh as they hear themselves actually swearing in the classroom in front of a religious brother, Clement waits with his hand meekly raised. Brother Cosmas says – tell us the worst Clem. Clement says sweetly – what about barmaid Brother? knowing that the word is almost certainly not sinful but trying to appear worried about it so that the brother will be struck by his innocence. Brother Cosmas smiles and says – I don’t suppose it’s a very nice word but it’s certainly not a swear word. Clement is satisfied until Billie Malady stands up and says – please brother there’s a little boy in our street and he’s always saying fuckin, and sits down looking deeply troubled. The brother says – boys that word is a nasty horrible word that no Catholic boy should ever say. Billy Malady’s eyes open wide. Brother Cosmas says – don’t be worried now Bill – remember before we started I said you wouldn’t be committing any sin if you told me a word just to find out how bad it was – I’m very pleased you told me about it Billie. Clement wishes that he could have thought of the word before Malady. The brother says – and now boys I want to ask you if ever you hear a boy at this school using that word to come quietly to me and tell me about it and I’ll say something myself in private to the boy and he’ll never know who told me. The boy named Reginald Pearce puts up his hand and says – please Brother when my big brothers get drunk they go around the house and shout that word. Brother Cosmas looks sadly at Pearce and says – you poor little chap – I’ll pray for you and your brothers every night from now on, and Clement envies even Reginald Pearce. One day Brother Cosmas urges the boys to persuade their parents to say the family rosary every night. He draws in a special panel of the blackboard a huge rosary with each of the beads only a faint white outline. As each boy reports that his family has begun to say the family rosary every night or has always said it, that boy is allowed to choose a bead, to go over its outline with blue chalk, and to write his initials inside. Clement cautiously asks his father whether they might start saying the family rosary. Augustine says – it’s all very well for families whose fathers come home from work with nothing better to do than put their feet up over the fireplace to be falling down on their knees for half an hour – in my position with hours of racing work to do on top of my ordinary job God doesn’t expect us to be droning out long prayers like Pharisees and Bible-bashers. Clement whispers a decade to himself each night while he lies in bed. He reports to Brother Cosmas that the rosary is now being said in the Killeatons’ house, and writes C.K. in blue in one of the beads. When Brother Cosmas spends a week talking about vocations, Clement asks such questions as whether every brothers’ house has a chapel somewhere inside and whether the brothers have special prayers like a priest’s office that they say every day walking up and down the paths in their garden. He mentions to his father that he would love to see inside the brothers’ house and find out where their chapel is hidden. Augustine warns him not to start talking like that in front of the brothers or the next thing he knows they’ll be signing him up to join them. One day Clement complains of feeling sick during Brother Cosmas’s period. At the end of the period the brother tells him to come over to the brothers’ house and have a cup of hot cocoa. Brother Cosmas leads him down a long bare corridor into a big steamy kitchen. An ugly grey-haired woman grudgingly prepares a cup of cocoa and hands it to the boy without a spoon so that he has to drink it with a sheet of scum clinging to his top lip. He wishes that he could ask the brother to show him the chapel that is somewhere among the long corridors. When he tells his parents about his visit to the brothers’ house, his father says – now I suppose the brothers will think we don’t look after you properly at home. A few days later Clement goes to bed with chicken-pox. After he has been away from school for a week, Brother Cosmas knocks on the door on Saturday afternoon with a bag of oranges and a stack of comics. Mrs Killeaton is embarrassed because the house is untidy and Clement is ashamed that the house is so simply designed that merely by walking into the front passage Brother Cosmas can see where all the rooms are and could not suspect that other rooms might lie hidden from his sight. That night Augustine tells his wife that she should have refused to accept the oranges and told the brother they were perfectly capable of feeding their boy properly. He says that he’d better check the comics to make sure they’re fit for a boy to read.

  Clement fingers his precious rosary

  Each night when Clement says his decade of the rosary he uses an old set of wooden beads that his father has given him. One Saturday morning he asks his father for three shillings to spend and has to admit that he wants to buy a new set of beads. Augustine hands over the money reluctantly and says – it’s no use trying to shame us into saying the family rosary just to please some brother at school – I’m sure God would be much more pleased with you if you were a better boy to your parents instead of buying fancy beads and tricking your bedroom out with altars. Clement looks at his mother, but she hides her head behind a newspaper, ashamed of having told her husband about the sprays of cassia and tamarisk in glasses of water and the picture of Our Lady that Clement sometimes arranges on his dressing-table. Clement goes to Mrs Linahan’s shop and chooses one of a sheaf of rustling sets of beads all labelled Genuine Irish Horn Made in Eire. His beads have a crucifix of a dark amber stuff with a few motionless bubbles trapped inside, Hail Mary beads that are a greenish-blue but each of which is a different shade and even a slightly different shape from the others so that as he passes them through his fingers he is continually surprised to discover faint protuberances or minute caves where the tunnels through the beads have been imperfectly formed or even a jagged edge where a whole corner of a hemisphere is missing, each of which turns his thoughts in a new direction and reassures him that the rosary is not a monotonous prayer,
that if he keeps his mind alert and moves his fingers forward regularly after each Hail Mary he will surely feel between his fingertips unexpected shapes continually challenging him to imagine still more abstruse glories of Our Lady. Better still, when he says his decade with the bedroom light turned on and watches the beads being hauled by fractions of inches into the grasp of his index finger and thumb and sees how the green in one lapses into a suggestion of golden-orange just beneath its surface, or in another competes against a knotty core of blue whose influence spreads far and wide, or in another is so thick with strange bubbles and granules that it maintains its true colour only against the strongest light, he begins to appreciate what a profusion of things – tears trickling endlessly down noble affronted faces, golden aureoles with long spears of light reaching upwards a thousand miles and more to some dazzling window on the plains of heaven, and long cruel journeys lying ahead of the most devoted families – must lie behind the Mysteries of the Rosary. Often, instead of saying the prescribed number of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, Clement says his own version of the Rosary, reciting in order the names of the fifteen mysteries – Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation, Finding in the Temple, Agony, Scourging, Crowning with Thorns, Carrying of the Cross, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, Descent of the Holy Ghost, Assumption, and Coronation – starting at some bead chosen at random and moving forward one bead for each mystery so that whenever he pauses and holds a bead between his fingers like a marble against the light, its colour always takes him by surprise and forces him to search for some correspondence between something in the mystery that it stands for and the cool minute fire within the blue-green horn. He becomes so skilled at this that in only a few seconds he can relate the subtlest shade from an almost impenetrable bottle-green to an elusive fragmented lime-yellow to some landscape that Our Lord once passed through or some sunlit leaves that Our Lady once waited beneath and can see the name of any mystery as no more than a frail wall, like the outer quivering skin of a globular jelly, barely containing the luminous unstable mass behind it. When some of the metal links of his rosary break, Clement goes to Brother Cosmas, who once announced to his class that he could mend broken rosaries. The brother takes Clement to a workshop for senior boys. He repairs the beads with a pair of pliers in a few minutes. Clement sees that the room is almost deserted and says in his most fetching voice – I love my rosary Brother. Brother Cosmas puts his arm around the boy and whispers – you must be Our Lady’s little baby.

  Clement enjoys Devil Doone comics

  Clement’s parents never allow him to waste money on buying comics. If he borrows some old comics from the Postlethwaite boys his mother glances through them first to make sure that they are fit for him to read. While Clement lies on the couch recovering from chicken-pox and reading the comics that Brother Cosmas has brought him, Augustine says – I’m surprised that a religious brother approves of his pupils wasting their time with such trash. When his parents are out of the room Clement turns his face towards the back of the couch and reads again his Devil Doone comics. A man with dark hair brushed smooth and flat and a thin moustache travels wherever he pleases in an unnamed land of deserts and prairies and towering cities that can only be America. Clement discovers that, just as he had suspected, there are secluded places in cities like New York where a man can keep the woman he loves safe from any mischance and hidden from the eyes of other men. He studies every line in the drawings of Devil Doone and a beautiful woman in a penthouse and even tries with a pencil to embellish the meagre, faintly disappointing, outlines and unfinished pen-strokes to help him visualise more clearly the dazzling sheets of plate-glass that keep out the least breeze from the roof garden, the elongated couches set among thickets of greenery from potted plants and piled absurdly high with satiny cushions, and the ornate cages of exotic birds and tanks of brilliant fish. He is pleased to learn that when a man is sure that the woman he loves will never again be tempted to admire other men he can find places called nightclubs where he and she can sit for hours in private corners behind pillars faced with mirrors and look out between gigantic palm fronds to where the shining windows of skyscrapers outnumber the stars. Clement reads aloud the words that float above Devil Doone’s rigid moustache in the last panel of a comic as he clasps his arms gently around the woman that he has had to travel hundreds of miles to find at last and rescue at the risk of his life – so my kitten has learned not to play with fire – now there’s one more lesson I want to teach her. He stares hard at the few lines in the background that suggest that the place where the man and woman have found each other at last is in the heart of the flat countryside of America far from any penthouse or night club. He tries to draw the scenes that follow but cannot make a landscape or a woman’s naked body that is any more than a few unsatisfying black strokes on a grey-white background. He turns to the next in the series of Devil Doone’s adventures. Like the mysteries of the rosary, the Devil Doone comics offer different scenes and different kinds of struggles towards triumphant conclusions that can be meditated on to reveal many kinds of truths. But even after a whole afternoon spent pondering on the Devil’s mysteries, Clement realises that there is still some secret hidden from him which, if only he could discover it, would make Devil Doone and the woman he loves and the countryside all around them as real as the people and the landscape around Tamarisk Row and might even teach him how to build in the country around the racecourse a city like New York or St Louis where people could do as Devil did. Devil Doone in his last and greatest adventure stands on a mountain that ought to have been in the Rockies and tells a woman who has been the most evasive of all his girlfriends that she must come and look at his etchings. Clement asks his mother what etchings are. She claims she does not know. He asks his father, and Augustine wants to know where he read the word. Clement has to show him the Devil Doone comic. Augustine burns all the stories of the Devil in the stove and tells the boy to stop reading American trash and to find something worthwhile in his own bookshelf. The only book there that appeals to Clement is Man-Shy by Frank Dalby Davison. He glances again at its pages and cannot wait to build in a corner of his backyard some timbered ranges where a herd of wild cattle can breed and wander unchecked by fences, easily avoiding the men who are slowly working their way towards them. But when he puts Man-Shy back on the shelf he notices a dictionary there, and looks up the word etchings. He decides that his parents and the adults who produced the Devil Doone comics must be aware of things that he has still not yet discovered. He builds his timbered ranges, but sets them in mountains even further away than America so that the people who advance slowly towards the wild cattle may come from cities where, in stranger places than penthouses and night clubs, men and women do things together that cannot be described in words or pictures.

  Clement draws wonderful pictures with crayons

  In the first week of the year Brother Cosmas tells the boys to cover their Religion exercise books with brown paper and then to choose a holy picture and paste it on the cover. He advises them to spend a lot of time choosing the picture because it is meant to inspire them with devotion all through the year and for years afterwards. He strongly recommends that they choose a picture of Our Lady, who is the best patron that a boy could ever have. Clement persuades his mother to pay twopence in Mrs Linahan’s devotional shop for a card that shows Our Lady so close up that the texture of her skin and the shape of her face compel him to run his fingers gently over her perfect features. Around the edge of her blue mantle is a row of stars of a gold so delicate that it fades from his sight when he holds the picture at a certain angle in strong light and suggests to him a motif for the next inch or so of the pattern of grace that he is trying to embroider on the white stuff of his soul. Once each week Brother Cosmas allows the boys to fill a page in their books with a few sentences that he prints on the blackboard and a picture that they may draw to please themselves. Only a few boys can afford coloured pencils. Clement, like most of his class, has a small box of
cheap crayons. He uses all his time in class to print his sentences neatly, then takes the book and his crayons home at night to finish the page. After tea he tells his mother that he has a lot of hard homework in Religion and works on his page for an hour at the kitchen table. He chooses two colours that he knows are not often used together by other boys (dark-blue and green, purple and orange, pink and black) and adds rays or aureoles or ghostly outlines to all the words of his sentences – one colour for capital letters, the other for small letters. Around evocative words like sacrament, sanctifying grace, rosary, extreme unction, he makes a special border of the two colours. Because he has never been able to draw anything better than childish stick figures, he searches through his collection of holy cards and the religious books (Little Brother Jesus, My Lord and My God – A Child Assists at Mass, Our Lady’s Bouquet) that his aunts have sent him as presents and traces the outlines of holy people onto tissue-paper, then copies them into his Religion book. After this he only has to colour in the outlines and add trees or hills or stars or rays of splendour or clusters of flowers or clouds with spears of light thrusting through to complete his illustration. Sometimes his father glances at his Religion book and tells him what a pity it is that he doesn’t spend more time making himself a saint around the house instead of tittivating a book to curry favour with the brothers. But Clement is confident that he and Brother Cosmas know the truest kind of religion, which has nothing to do with drying dishes or answering parents cheerfully but is meant to make a person aware of the shadowy trees and shrubs in the background of holy pictures and of what might be behind them, or to show him pictures of incredibly smooth skin and garments coloured like the sky or the sea and altars glowing like jewels in labyrinthine churches which will inspire him to make his own heart and soul a maze of naves and tunnels and crypts and fiery altars draped with strangely coloured cloths so that Our Lady and little Jesus and the saints may delight in discovering at odd corners places after their own hearts, which they have prepared in heaven so that those who love them can wander off out of sight of the throngs of ordinary Catholics who have only just managed to save their souls and compare inch by inch each pathway that leads to further pathways and each alley-way that seems to end in a blaze of light from no apparent source with the miles of pathways and alley-ways there. Every Monday is Gospel Day, when Brother Cosmas tells the class a story from the New Testament about Jesus. This is the day that Clement likes least because there is nothing in the story of Jesus as a grown man that seems suitable for the pages of his Religion book. On every day but Monday Clement listens closely to Brother Cosmas, waiting for words and phrases that he can enshrine in coloured crayons in his book at the end of the week. One day the brother holds up in front of the class the Religion book belonging to Billie Malady and says – this page is probably the most beautiful that any boy in this grade has ever done and yet if it was a thousand times more beautiful it wouldn’t even give us the faintest idea of the beautiful places that are waiting for us if we listen to Jesus.