A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  Stevenson watched him in the hot stillness of the little cabin.

  “The others are going ashore now,” he said. “How about you?”

  Greely glanced up, his eyelids hooded, his eyes vague.

  “If you don’t mind waiting a few minutes,” he said, “I’ll be through with this.”

  “May I help?” Stevenson asked not expecting he might have to.

  Greely was always a surprise. “My shaving gear,” he said solemnly, “and some underpants drying in the galley. And those books.”

  He packed his own crucifix into a leather bag and slipped that into his case while Stevenson gathered up the last few things. They smelled of prayer and old paper and the musk lollies that he sucked endlessly. His lips were moving quietly even now, the teeth clicking against the hard pink sugar.

  “Aren’t you well?” Greely asked curiously as they went slowly up the steps. Stevenson had stopped for a moment, his hand to his side.

  “I’m not sure, really,” Stevenson said. “I get a bit of pain now and again. I think it’s nerves. Family stuff. You know how it is.”

  Greely didn’t, but made clucking noises as he heaved his body upwards, crawling into the daylight.

  “There,” he said. “Forgive my delaying you.”

  The others had vanished from the deck.

  Looking over the side Stevenson saw their upturned faces like a savage garden swaying in the dinghy. He had missed the orgy of leg and thigh and overbalance and the wild frantic moments when Miss Trumper misjudged and splashed one sandalled foot into the harbour. The native boy was still grinning, but standing politely back holding the tow-rope and swinging it gently. He swung more than rope—it was the half-timid, half-insolent gesture of the black-white relationship. Stevenson recognized it for that and rubbed the boy’s frizzy skull as he passed.

  “Hold her still now,” he said. “You’ve two big fellers coming.”

  Sky, boat, harbour, passengers rocked. The priest squeezed in beside Miss Paradise and shared the diminutive shade of her peachy frilled parasol. The boy tugged the outboard motor into life and they took to the harbour side at the end of a curve of silver. Looking back at it a variety of symbols lit each mind—crescent, circle, blade, life-source. Some were right. Some wrong.

  The thermometers in all the houses that morning stood at ninety-four point three.

  II

  September

  THE summer Lake came to Port Lena it rained hammers of wet. All the muddy waterfront streets were punched into slush, but it was Maugham country along which he drooled and oozed. Preciously, preciously with the deep chocolate and the milk-coffee slime playing about his consecrated feet. He said Mass in a mixture of pidgin and beach-la-mar and he would ease a gluey finger around his neck and, gazing across water to the horizon where mainland lay, would pray for winter, for the mid-season, one, two degrees behind, but full of the dry, the pouring blue.

  “Here, boy. Jimmy, James fella,” he would say grinning his tired fake Yank smile as he came in the mission yard. And up they’d run from the school below the church, the fellers, the brown eager fellers and the shy smaller ones who held back, and he would pat a head or a shoulder and they would grin their great toothy grins and rub the backs of their pink-palmed hands across their broad noses or scratch their fuzzy tops. When he kicked them a ball they’d babble like chooks.

  Ah God, it was good to be loved so. If it weren’t so contrived, he would admit.

  “Unkindness—this fella hurt that one fella,” Father Lake would say bending over his smaller parishioners, “is the worst sin of all.” He fidgeted with his cassock that he wore only to the first mass and became aware of the prickly heat creeping under his arms and the terrible itching of his feet as the heat grew more alive.

  “But, father,” asked one of the younger ones whose smile blew in and out like a flame in wind, “that’s only a little fella sin.”

  “I get tired,” Father Lake said, “of the belief that adultery is the only sin. Oh, those endless sins of petty sex.” The brown and white eyes rolled non-comprehendingly in their sockets. The white teeth split the face apart. He was tempted to disenchant at one stroke and say pusipusi but he only went on. “There are others. And to me, anyway—” (“Say kiddo, I’m not the Pope,” he wanted to add in his contrived American)—he smiled instead—“deliberate unkindness is the worst sin of all.”

  “Killing?”

  “Unkindness.”

  They laughed because they believed he was making a joke. He wasn’t though. “It’s very unkind to kill anybody,” he added, staring gravely from one to the other. Giggles burst like crackers.

  “Stealing?” shouted a bigger feller. “Stealing?”

  “Unkindness, too.”

  Their laughter was almost uncontrolled. One little boy had punched a bigger boy in the stomach with sheer pleasure at the nonsense.

  “Lying, lying?” they shouted. And they all took it up. “Lying?”

  “Now that is kindness to one’s self, make same fella happy.”

  He laughed with them. “Now that’s not tolerable is it?” They didn’t understand again. “That’s wrong.”

  The cobalt layer of sea gradated into air that seemed to split apart into yellow pips of light, and under this monstrous broadcast of heat-seed Lake sensed the paste that his body oozed trickle from under his panama down to his open shirt front, from the waistband of his trousers down his thin flanks. Jimmy and Edward Peter moved their amused polished faces away from him but not before he had patted their departing vulnerable shoulders. All kidstakes, kidstakes, he assured himself, watching them and the church and the next religious layer above that, the presbytery, and beyond that again and sedately aside, the bishop’s residence. One more year before leave, he counted. Only the one. And he recalled all those other priests who had said, baffled, “But this is home. We hate to go. We don’t want to. Where else is there?”

  I want, he thought. I want and want the dehydrated streets of my birthplace with the flies and the palms and the canopies of figs and the milk-bar Saturdays of my youth and the coffee-shop evenings of first adulthood and the packed warm bodies of the midday rush hour that were ever so the way, the truth and the light. Between his teeth he whistled a gut-stirring tune whose words he could never remember, only the faces of the young couple who had sung it in the Lantana one evening when he had dropped by for a drink. The first, he recalled, and only the one he had assured himself at the time, although the one had stretched like the miracle of the loaves and fishes and had become ten or eleven. It was his little weakness. Not his only one, but the first obvious and pertinent crack in his priestly career. His bishop had cautioned him afterwards.

  “Dear father,” he had extreme-unctioned, “you must endeavour. . . .” He became lost in vine growths of embarrassment. “Their ways are not our ways, as it were.”

  He fiddled with the folds of his soutane. Father Lake made one or two protesting and apologetic noises which Deladier ignored, allowing his streaked eyes to glance away through the tropical garden to the unconverted brilliance of the bay.

  “One does not have to have leprosy to treat it,” he said. A native, yelling compliments, was running past the banana fence in pursuit of a pretty girl.

  “One does not wish for it,” the bishop added reprovingly after the vanished couple. “One does not wish. One does not wish.”

  Lake found that he was holding his left hand in a terrible grip from the right. He observed this frail old man secure in the knowledge that his soul was destined for eternal bliss and he wanted to rattle the calm. “Ah,” he heard himself saying, or imagined that he could hear, “you’re wrong there. One does. I hate your stinking pedantic ‘one’, but one does. One is starved for even death in the flesh trapped here between the heat and the wet.” But he only said, “Do you wish me to go out on supply next month? You know Father Dooley is leaving Santo for a while. I think a couple of months. His mother is ill.”

  Deladier was groomed
for every sophistry of response. He dropped his eyes. “I think we should be having lunch—” and he clapped his chalky hands for the house boy who was Jimmy Terope’s older brother. “I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “We must talk about it later.” He procrastinated for God.

  John Terope was a slender boy of sixteen, lean, over-tender, orphaned, aware. He knew too much of the needs of older people, and would with pressure grant these. Deliberately and presciently he stared at his bare feet, moved them over the linoleum, and shuttered his dark eyes.

  “Good morning, John,” Father Lake said, smiling.

  John Terope glanced obliquely at the father.

  “Guddee, father,” he said shyly. It was not really shyly.

  “Yes,” said the bishop. “Well, John is a splendid fellow. Really a splendid fellow. We’ll have him an altar boy before long. Dominus vobiscum, John, eh, eh?”

  “Et cum spiritu tuo,” replied John blurredly but pleased.

  “You see?” said the bishop, presenting his protégé as if he were some musical genius. “A splendid fellow. I think we’ll need lunch in half an hour. Is Sister in the kitchen?”

  “Yes, your grace.”

  Father Lake’s somewhat watered down blue eyes met those of the boy with a transient rapport as he scuffled a little, out of formal diffidence and excited apprehension. What elaborate glister on the skin, pondered the priest. What charity of flesh, of mouth. The long summers were relaxed, the flaccid days melted into shapes of this or that, crosses dropped and did not save, being in this tropic margin foreign as snow, being unreal posed against outrageous native totem or tropic leaf or long canoe.

  In the beginning, Lake pondered, two years ago, there definitely was the Word and the Word was Light. But its brilliance was outshone by heat, by everlasting summer, by sea dazzle, by sweat, by the apathy of the congregation belting out a post-offertory hymn to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, by his own growing despair. He had long ago stopped saying his Office with care and jabbered it quickly in the evening in the interval between the first brandy and the next four. He sometimes could not utter the words of consecration, and sometimes would not. That was the end of the line, they had all told him at the seminary. The sinning priest refrained as a last resort to avoid the final sacrilege of consecrating while in a state of mortal sin. That, he had been told, was the slagged junction, the darkened workshop and the final pull into shadow.

  Lunch was a failure. There was cold fish salad and spongy bread. The bishop, who was not a man of fleshly taste, appeared not to notice. Lake between bites watched John Terope paddle backwards and forwards to the kitchen.

  “I don’t know,” Deladier said, abstractedly trying to fork a piece of melon onto his plate. A fish flake hung from his chin. His dignity was dropping away. “I don’t see how we can spare you.”

  “I need the change,” Lake said. “That’s really my trouble. I need it very badly.”

  “Here is your test, my son,” said the bishop with a shade of sanctimoniousness. “Offer it up. We must all expose ourselves to aridity of some kind.”

  “I am afraid,” Lake said with an effort.

  He thought that the bishop had not heard, for he was still fighting the melon. He repeated his remark.

  “Of what?” asked Deladier at last with his mouth full.

  “Of myself.”

  “Ah. More fish, my son?”

  Sweet Jesus, Lake prayed. And there he was ten years, fifteen years ago, opening the door of the vestry behind the church, the door to the small room that held bed and piano, admitting the girl in blue.

  “Hullo!” he had said. “Come in.”

  There was only the self-righteous chair for her to sit on or the music stool. And she played later as he sang, doing his Bing Crosby imitations, and there was a lot of laughter so that, as she left, quite impulsively he had bent forward and kissed her quickly on the cheek. That was all. “If you were a girl like that . . .” he had begun. That was still all. It was an illuminated picture he carried with him on supply to other parishes. “Come in,” he had been saying for years till now, at forty-three, although the knock no longer sounded, he kept calling uselessly.

  The bishop was as worldly as forty years of the confessional might make one, hearing over and over again the tiny stinking little sins of personal filth (in public or private? alone or with others? how many times and did you intend, and so on?), the nauseating endless chains of interlocked petty vices that tied human to human. Covertly he watched Father Lake and decided he needed a hair tonic or a vitamin count or both.

  “Eat up your greens,” he snapped. “For the love of God. They are a gesture from the hotel.”

  “Cook, the anti-scorbutic Cook,” murmured Lake.

  “What? What did you say, Father Lake?”

  “A bit of history, your grace. Not the hotel cook, the mariner. Ah! the greens. They look very sad and old.”

  “It’s the weather. Seven days over the century. We are all tired and limp.”

  “Sad. Not limp.”

  “Sadness is like despair, Father Lake. Pass the mustard sauce, please. And despair is the unforgivable sin.”

  “At the risk of heresy I can never see it. Why, we all live in a more or less permanent state of it. Semi-permanent. I ought to tell you that I think sometimes perhaps I should give this all away.”

  The bishop, who was sinless because he was never tempted, laid down his knife and fork and pressed his finger-tips to the thin skin of his mouth. Something distasteful about this other man, he pondered. But what? He failed to interpret the emotional crise in another, for to him the year was divided, apart from its barely distinguishable climatic regions, into the seasons of lenten denial or feast-day cheer, of two regular inspection tours around the thousand-mile perimeter of his parish to tropic stations so exotic only a bishop could fail to be moved. He was fussy with his diet, abstemious in liquor, entirely humourless, and fond of traditional prayers. He never said, as Lake often feelingly did, “Christ, give us a break from the heat.” He had been born near Limoges a very long time ago and the stoic quality came perhaps from the clay of the region that had formed his brittle frame and pressed in his orthodoxy until it was a stamp of every conventional belief, religious and secular, under the heavens.

  They folded their napkins. The bishop uttered perfunctory heat-fever grace and they went out to the bungalow veranda and looked across the hill-slope to the British residency. In the paddock around the office buildings, some ritualistic martial ceremony was going on and the native band was walloping “Colonel Bogey” while Leslie Tucker-Brown in incredible formal dress and plumed helmet took the salute.

  “We have been asked for drinks,” said his grace, settling back in his episcopal deck-chair. The canvas took on the shape of his bony haunches.

  “Yum!” said flippant Lake. “Red Sea rig? You’re right with your purple cummerbund, but what about me and Terry?”

  “Dear boy,” Deladier said, “I shall really have to insist on more respect. Whatever will the—er—unconvinced think if they hear you address me so, so—is it disrespectfully, I wonder?

  “Not that at all.”

  “Well, something a little odd, isn’t it? I mean a shade left of boyish awe. Yes. Boyish awe.”

  “I am a quietly exhausted forty-three,” Lake confessed. “I no longer even respect the affirmations of the ciggy packs, the bottle wraps, or Aquinas at his best.”

  He got up and wandered along the veranda across whose splintered rail he could observe tantalizingly the brown John Terope padding between the lime-trees towards the water tanks behind the school. Ah! Ah! He could not, on a sudden, bear to look. “Save me,” he cried within. “Oh, save me.”

  But Deladier was unaware of his anguish, and had he been aware would have flung out rope after rope of common sense.

  “If you are going to be cynical like this tonight, perhaps you had better not come,” warned the bishop.

  John Terope was parting leaves in search of fruit as if hi
s life depended on it, each gesture a balletic mime to the watcher on the veranda, for the brown fingers came away empty seven times out of nine. A basket was being filled. Two pirogues slid over the harbour blue paddled by shouts that propelled glassy water. God save me, God save me, Lake was praying, from a lack of love.

  Deladier had allowed his wrinkled lids to close on his secretless eyes as his breath deepened and became heavy. His head dropped forward a little.

  Stepping tippy-toe, Father Lake sat for the next few moments in another deck-chair alongside, lit a cigarette, smoked, made regular sucking noises and lulled his pastor into slumber. John Terope had moved from the orchard, meanwhile, and could be heard swapping lollipop dialogue with the gardener from the next house. Their laughter festooned what was obviously a fruit-haggling ceremony. The last strains of “Colonel Bogey” died away on the parade-ground—one of the natives had fainted in his full-dress uniform—and easy as sin Father Lake hoisted his skinny body from the lounger and soft-shoed like the old routiner that once brought the Hibernian Society Hall down about his ears as he slipped down the veranda steps across the summer lawn into the shade maze of fruit-trees.

  “Johnny,” he called. “Johnny Terope.” Ever so softly. “Come here a moment.”

  “Father?” came the bodiless voice. The laugh under the voice. The implication?

  “Here. By the papaws.”

  John was carrying the half-full basket, his slim neck straining sideways in a manner that made Lake bite his lip and refute the gestures of his culpable flesh.

  “Are they for the bishop? The limes?”

  “Not all, father.”

  “Not all?”

  “No. Some belong the doctor.”

  “Belong doctor!” Lake said reprovingly.