Office of Innocence (15 page)

Left into Bombay Street and a long, long straggle of low houses—two-storied pretension had never reached Lidcombe. This was what Aunt Madge called “battler territory”; some of the dispiriting aura of the late Depression still hung here. Every tide of event seemed to sweep over the people of such a suburb and recede, leaving them as they were, with the character of desert fruit. As they were, that is, except for the grace of God, abundantly available to them at St. Joachim's, Lidcombe, from the hands of Father Tuomey and his curate. In one of these houses with corrugated iron roof and mute windows—Darragh was supposed to believe—hid a black deserter.

The second car pulled ahead of them and vanished far down the road. The corporal murmured that they'd come in from the next street. “You okay, Father?” asked Fratelli, frowning at him, the sergeant's huge eyes unreadable, full of mercy or bloodshed.

“Yes,” claimed Darragh.

“This should go well,” murmured Fratelli, and Darragh was reassured. He strained around in his seat to look at the truck behind him, which was rolling around the corner.

“Father,” he said, “you wait in the car till I send for you. Okay?”

“There it is,” said the driver, pointing to a house. “Forty-seven.”

Fratelli's car creaked to the edge of the pavement. Darragh could see up the side of the house to an old-fashioned garden, the sort in which privet and rhododendrons would grow amongst paspalum grass, and chickens ran wild and yielded up their lives for weddings and feast days.

“Okay, Father,” stated Fratelli. The corporal had jumped from the car, and Fratelli made ready to follow. Noisily enough to warn a suburb, the truck's brakes howled behind Darragh, and its tailboard crashed open. American soldiers and three Australians emerged. Fourteen men all told. The mystery of command, which Fratelli exercised so easily. And though aware of having been conscripted by Fratelli, Darragh felt an unfamiliar exhilaration at being part of his command. Some red bubble of sweet fear and significance swelled in his throat. Yes, it was apparent. He was willing to be a soldier. Several of Fratelli's men, advancing crouched and with their weapons across their bodies, made a squad across the mouth of the laneway to the back, and the other half of the force, led by Fratelli himself, went up three or four steps to the front door and hammered on it. Before anyone could respond, they began to force it open. From within the shrieks of women were heard, and the household became suddenly shrill and raucous. The screaming of women was joined by the barking and shouting of soldiers' voices, a pitiless sound.

Waiting in the car, Darragh saw a barefooted black man in a white singlet and trousers sitting on the sash of one of the side windows. He seemed to be having trouble fitting his body through, and instantly and fluidly amended his posture. The upper body and its white singlet disappeared, and now, with more success, the barefooted legs in fawn army pants appeared. The black soldier hit the ground as those military police to the side of the house noticed the fact. He disappeared into the vast, semirural backyard. Seeming so exorbitantly overdressed for their prey and their banal surroundings, his chasers followed him, yelling. The front door swung blankly open, and the shouting and shrieking were more distant. At last a fine-featured young American emerged from the laneway and leaned, beneath a glistening helmet, to speak to Darragh.

“Master Sergeant Fratelli says come now, Father, quick.” The young man gently opened the door for him, waited for him to step on the pavement, and then led him away at a fast-paced walk, crouching, up the side of the house. Darragh found himself crouching too, and reaching for the stole in his pocket. As Fratelli had foretold, this business seemed to Darragh to beg a sacramental resolution.

So they passed the side of the house and came into the arena of action—a wide tract of grass decorated with privet hedge borders, lovingly kept in order. By the back steps of the house, an older and a younger woman, mother in floury apron and daughter in headscarf, stood stricken-mouthed under the guard and restraint of two of Fratelli's Americans. The rest of Fratelli's force lay in a cordon around a brown-painted structure at the end of the yard, a building which seemed undecided whether it was shed, barn, garage, or stables, and seemed to be fairly close to collapse under its uncertain identity. It was apparent that the deserter had gone to ground in there, was somewhere in its umber shadows. Was his heart racing as Darragh's was? At a nod from Fratelli, who stood by a privet bush, the corporal called languidly, “Come out there, Gervaise. Come on, ole feller.” But the chief sound for the moment was the weeping women, the lenient mother who probably kept the privet hedges, and the daughter who had been seduced by the black man. Fratelli presented himself solemnly to Darragh.

“You ready, Father? Can you go in and talk with the boy?”

The alternative to such an intervention did not need to be stated—it was apparent to Darragh in the tensely held weaponry all around. Even the Australians with their heavy .303s, their corporal—an older man, perhaps a veteran of an earlier war—now holding a delicate Owen gun, seemed to Darragh to be set only for the poles of resolution: the deserter's surrender or his death. This is what the caressing of weapons, the wearing of uniforms, the shrieking of women brought out in men—a glinting grim intent.

Fratelli left Darragh's side to let him think for a second, went to the women and told them reasonably to hush now, that they weren't helping anything. Then he returned. “Okay, Father?”

“Yes.”

“Come on then,” he said, leading Darragh towards the besieged structure. Near the door he held Darragh back a second.

“Gervaise!” he called. “Private Aspillon! You're in some big trouble in there. We've got MPs all around you, they've even come in from the other street. White troops, Gervaise, and you're technically a deserter. I don't need to instruct you on your choices, do I?”

A voice Darragh had heard only in recorded songs, the voice of black America, emerged from the shed, deeply layered with Southern and what Darragh thought of, from the little he knew from films, as Creole tones. Darragh likewise knew of New Orleans, as rendered down to him by motion pictures, as a place where Mexico and the West Indies, Africa, France, and America all abutted.

The voice said: “I'm no deserter, sir. Don't go putting that label on me. I'm just late back, that's all.”

The “just” went on endlessly, enhanced with diphthongs and the history of enslavement and underrewarded labor.

The corporal seemed suddenly angry on Fratelli's patient behalf. “Tell that to the boys on Bataan!” he yelled, and spat and shook his head.

“Now we know you're a Catholic, Gervaise,” called Fratelli. “I respect that. I've got a priest here. He wants you to come out.”

Fratelli turned to Darragh. “Tell him to come out, will you, Father?”

Darragh was tongue-tied.

“His name's Private Aspillon,” Fratelli prompted.

Darragh found his voice. “Private Aspillon, I'm Father Darragh from St. Margaret's. You should come out and surrender to these men, and I'll be here to see you're well treated.”

“God bless you, Father,” came the resonant voice. “But you don't know military police. You look, you'll see batons on their sides. Exactly for black heads. My poor suffering black head. You can't tell me, either, they don't have guns. And you don't know about their watch houses and their compounds. You don't want to know either.”

The slight on the Corps of Military Police seemed to arouse Fratelli's men to some cursing and spitting. Only the Australians, either wise or indifferent, weren't heard from.

“You're trying all our patience, Gervaise,” called Fratelli jovially.

“Father,” cried the deserter, “you come in here and I'll walk out with you. You stick to me and I know no harm will come.”

Darragh turned, full of decision, to Fratelli. “All right. I'll go in there.”

Fratelli nodded and called to his men, informing them that the priest was going to talk to Private Aspillon. Oddly, as it seemed for a second to Darragh, he did not use a name. Just “the priest.” Darragh went forward to the brown-painted door, sunk on its hinges and half jammed in muddy soil. He was not afraid, but delighted despite himself. Real work, he thought. Real, classic, and remediable sin—desertion, lechery, the potential cruelty of batons and firearms. In the midst of all the factors he was the mediator. And already enchanted by Gervaise's tiered voice. There seemed to be a palpable soul behind it. “I would you were either hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm I will spit thee forth from my mouth. . . .” Gervaise had not been lukewarm. “I go to call not the just, but sinners.” Gervaise fitted the bill.

Darragh now stepped forward into the half-darkness of Gervaise's refuge. A fat guineafowl descended querulously from a bag of seed and went out into the yard through the door Darragh had left ajar. Many bags of bran and pollen and a wheelbarrow blocked Darragh's immediate path. A Model T Ford sat on bricks in further dimness, its rump to Darragh, and beyond its front fender Gervaise stood up. He was tall, with blue-black skin.

“That's you, Father,” he said.

“Of course.”

“You sounded like a priest,” said Gervaise, flatteringly. “You'd got a lamb in your voice.”

“I . . . don't understand, Gervaise,” said Darragh, though he understood precisely.

“There was the lamb in your voice, not the tiger,” said Gervaise. “The tigers are out there, and I'll get thrown to them.”

“Not by me. The man in charge—he wants you safe. And surely, you have to go back.”

“I like the way you guys say that. ‘
Surely.
' ” He did his failed best to reproduce the Australian accent. “My girl Rosemary says it that way. I like that. It's better than our way. You've got a lot of things that are better than our way.”

Darragh had negotiated the bags of pollen, but some five or six yards still lay between him and the absconder.

“We ought to go out now, Gervaise.”

“I want to confess, first.”

“Why not after we've gone out?”

“No, I want to confess first. In here I'm a sinner. Once I step out I'm Jesus Christ on the cross.”

“I wouldn't say you'd lived like Jesus,” said Darragh.

“Every man who suffers on earth is joined to the suffering of Jesus Christ,” said Gervaise Aspillon, his eyes blazing. And such a proposition could not be faulted theologically.

“I should tell them,” said Darragh, and he turned and went to the door.

“He's coming out in a moment,” called Darragh through the aperture to the earnest besieging line. “He wants to talk for a moment first.” Darragh did not mention confession. He did not want to subject it to the derision which he suspected lay submerged in the MPs, other than Fratelli.

“A few minutes, Father,” called Fratelli. “Don't let him hold you up. He'll be persuasive.”

Darragh advanced to the front fender of the Ford.

“Hello, Gervaise,” he murmured from his new closeness. He and Gervaise shook hands. The black deserter's hand was huge and knobby with calluses. Darragh took his purple stole out of his pocket, showed it to the black man, then kissed its golden cross and placed it round his neck. “Let's begin.”

Gervaise advanced and stood towering above him with head bent.

Darragh uttered the opening words of the rite, “The Lord be in thy heart and on thy lips . . .” as Private Aspillon crossed himself and murmured in his sweetly dolorous voice, “Bless me Father for I have sinned. It is . . . oh . . . maybe ten months since my last confession. I have been guilty of sins of the flesh—it is not my girl's fault. She is generosity itself. I have been guilty of pride.”

In the circumstances, Darragh knew he was permitted not to inquire much into this broad and heartfelt statement of guilt.

“I,” Gervaise continued, “have been guilty of the greatest folly in that I saw in this woman a life, and I coveted it. Whereas the dumbest man born would have told me it was not a life I could live, not even on the Western Line in Sydney with a white wife. Stupidity offends the Lord, and for His sake, I am heartily sorry. For all these sins of pride and of the flesh I am contrite.”

It struck Darragh that this man had a straightforward but thorough understanding of the theology of penance. He had touched all the crucial components of contrition. Except one. “And you disobeyed lawful authority,” Darragh suggested.

“Father,” said Gervaise, “for some men authority”—he pronounced it something like
orthorty
—“is a kind mother, and they love her. For others, an ax! I find the army hard, Father, and it's hard on me. Now the ax is here. Outside. Believe me, I'll be sorry enough for it. For this and all my other sins I am heartily sorry.”

Darragh absolved him. As soon as Gervaise had finished muttering a well-schooled Act of Contrition, he straightened. He did not need Darragh to advise him. “Out we go,” he said. The “o” of “go” once more had layers of dolor and diphthong to it. It was not the plain Australian go. It was a long journey of a vowel.

At the instant its sound wavered away, the air was cracked open by a sound so substantial it assaulted the ear and the brain twice, as shocking in echo as in its first instant assault. Then a rage of sound came, both sharp and constant crackling but also a broader, symphonic racket which absorbed all the shed's available space and seemed to Darragh to jolt the Model T on its brick pylons. Gervaise grabbed Darragh, who had placed his hands to his ears and yearned for the moist dirt of the floor, and pushed him into the lee of the Model T. Smelling of vegetables and cinnamon, the soldier's crouching body encompassed prone Frank Darragh's. It came to Darragh: they were shooting at himself and Gervaise for inscrutable reasons. Their repressed intention to use their weapons had burst out in a storm, and even beneath Gervaise's body and widespread arms, Darragh felt himself as a leaf before its force. Huddled with and oppressed so intimately by Gervaise Aspillon, Darragh felt that having started, the noise would remain continuous. Through the slits of his eyes he could nonetheless see sunlight flash everywhere and without discrimination as boards were blown loose and pulped and shattered. Darragh longed for an unlikely stoppage to the tempest and yet was astonished at how calmly he and the deserter lay, brave absolved Gervaise with his back exposed to the fire. The truth was that since the tumult possessed everything, owned every bone, took cordite deep into the nostrils, and completely filled the heart, it left no room for fear, not even a niche for an insinuating shudder of terror. Then, having laid claim to everything, it departed. The air now was hollow and thin as an eggshell, and all sound was smudged and spidery. But he did hear the wailing of women from within the house, and Fratelli distantly screaming. “What sonofabitch started that? For Christ's sake, what sonofabitch?”