Office of Innocence (20 page)

XVI

He was pleased to decide he did not need to tell the monsignor of his intended visit to Gervaise. In any case, what harm could occur under the aegis of Captain O'Rourke? There were no jurisdictions to be violated. Bearing his grief, he would be a visitor, and he would behave like it. A seemly curate.

Darragh, the same purple stole in his pocket as he had taken into his first encounter with Private Aspillon, made the considerable journey by steam train to Liverpool. This was a town not so far beyond Sydney's outskirts, a place where by day the residual heat of summer seemed to arise from hard-baked earth in streets broadly surveyed as if for some British cantonment in India. By arrangement, Captain O'Rourke picked him up from the northern side of the station, opposite a straggle of garages, frock shops, and little grocery stores of the kind his father had called Ned Kellys. The American chaplain was already waiting by a large khaki Buick appropriate, in Darragh's eyes, to General MacArthur. He was accompanied by a smartly dressed American soldier-driver who smoked while waiting for the visitor. Now he dispensed with his cigarette and came across the street to meet Darragh.

“Father Duggan?” said the driver.

“Darragh.”

“That's the one. Sorry, sir. Any luggage?”

He reached for the small grip Darragh had brought with him and took it to the car. Captain O'Rourke, who looked like a slightly florid athlete, shook Darragh's hand as the driver opened the back door of the Buick for them to enter. O'Rourke wore no clerical collar but an army tie, and seemed very martial in a splendid peaked cap and tan suit, and his two bars, to signify his rank, at the collar of his shirt. He said it was nice to meet Darragh, but Darragh could tell that he was watchful for signs of eccentricity or excess in his visitor.

The car set off, the two priests in the back together. “Okay,” said O'Rourke, “as I told you on the phone, I set it up for you to visit this Aspillon guy, but it took some doing. His trial isn't up yet, and I know they'll come down heavy on him.”

“Heavy?” asked Darragh. A shiver ran through him. He had had enough of heavy comings-down.

“Depends whether they end up deciding he's AWOL or a deserter. And then of course there's the fact of cohabitation . . . some of these white girls! My guess is he'll get a five-year sentence.”

“Five years?”

“That's right. At least he wasn't in the face of the enemy when he went missing.”

“He sheltered me with his body,” said Darragh. “I could tell the judges that.”

“Father, believe me. That's just a grace note. Counts for nothing. Look, I went to see him and he's not a bad kid. Wild. Too much appetite. And an operator. Plausible. But when you go missing like he did, little positive traits of character don't add up to much at a court-martial.”

They drew up to the camp gate in a country of stunted eucalypts and acacia. The rituals of admission, the gestures of the military police, were all so emphatic. Americans were good at military liturgy, an art form much more casually attended to in the Australian army. No movement these men made seemed casual or negligent. In their standings to attention, in their impeccable webbing, they seemed to Darragh to have built a ritual bridgehead against the enemy.

It became apparent as Captain O'Rourke's car entered that the numbers of Americans within the gates had tested the accommodation provided by this complex of Great War huts in which the recruits of 1915, his father amongst them, had spent their last peaceful nights before the madness of France and Flanders. Barracks gave way to long rows of tents, somehow aesthetically pleasing in their choreographed orderliness, the way the ropes of one echoed and ran parallel to the corresponding ropes of the next. The farther into the camp one went, the more tents proliferated. This was at some level a comfort to Darragh. Common wisdom had it that most American troops were either waiting in Melbourne or training in North Queensland. So if there were so many as these in the outer townships and suburbs of Sydney, Australia was not as wide open and bereft of support as was the popular belief.

Deeply into the camp, they came to a region of high wire gates and fences, surrounded by wooden watchtowers. Armed guards stood atop the towers, on watch against their own—at first sight, a peculiar task for a patriot. This detention compound was thickly tented out as well—so many misdemeanors and crimes had apparently been committed in a few months by the soldiers of Australia's great ally and best hope. Only one permanent structure lay in there—a guard hut to which, having dismounted from the Buick at the gate and entered an opened portal within it, Fathers O'Rourke and Darragh were led. They were offered a seat in a barred-off section of the structure, furnished with a table and chairs for interviews of this nature. The other part of the hut was a large holding cell, empty today. A natty military policeman waiting by the door pointed to Darragh's grip and asked him would he mind opening it, and whether he had brought anything for the prisoner. Darragh produced a pocket missal and a set of rosary beads.

The military policeman was half embarrassed in saying, “He can have the book, Father. The rosary beads . . .”

“A prisoner could hang himself with those, see!” Father O'Rourke explained to Darragh. “Don't worry, we have communal rosary and they use natural beads. Their fingers.”

“I brought some biscuits too,” said Darragh, reaching further into his little bag. “Shortbread.”

The military policeman looked strickenly at Father O'Rourke, who said, “Sorry, Father Darragh. It's always Lent in here. If you'd leave them with me, I'll make sure they get to some of the other guys.”

Of course, Darragh handed them over to O'Rourke, who seemed amused to receive them and asked a guard near the door to take them to his driver.

Before a proper conversation could develop between Darragh and O'Rourke, tall Gervaise Aspillon, accompanied by two MPs and chained at the wrists and the ankles, was brought in through the further door. The connecting links were loose, so that at a nod from his mentors Gervaise was able to consider sitting, but not before, eyes aglow with modest hope, he greeted the priests, O'Rourke with an equally enthusiastic nod as for Darragh. As Gervaise settled, O'Rourke leaned towards Darragh and murmured, “Father, I might just leave you alone? Before I do, you wouldn't get a fellow priest into trouble, would you?”

Aspillon wore an expression of tranquil benevolence as he waited for this private discourse between the priests to end.

“I simply wanted to see the man.”

“No file in your pocket?” asked O'Rourke, winking.

“No file in my pocket, I promise, Father O'Rourke.”

“Okay. Just remember—for Gervaise, there's only one way out of here. Serving his time, here or wherever.” He looked away. “I'll tell you something about ‘wherever' later.” He raised his voice for the prisoner. “Gervaise, be good for Father Darragh.”

“Sure, Captain,” said Private Aspillon.

O'Rourke left, and, in steadfast silence, Private Aspillon engaged Darragh's eye. Darragh felt for a moment like a public speaker who had suddenly lost his purpose for being on the rostrum. Aspillon said, “How are you now, Father? After our big shake-up the other day.”

“On top of everything . . . well, a parishioner has died, Gervaise. I'm saddened. But how are you going?”

“One word, Father, I am happy to say.
Dull
. Dull I like. Lots of groceries in here. Time hanging heavy, but not burying a man. I think this is all gentler treatment than one of them solid-built prisons. Once they put those stone walls up, strange things are bound to happen. But wire and wooden posts, God's air can travel in and out. The same air other folk breathe. I'd be obliged if you'd pass that on to my friends in Lidcombe. You remember the house?”

“I don't think it's my business to communicate with them. It's the area of another parish priest. Are you allowed to write?”

“Once a month, and this month is going to my mama.”

“I'll call the parish priest at Lidcombe, and see if he will contact your friends.”

“I would be
so
obliged,” said Gervaise smoothly, so that Darragh wondered, Is this a performance—as others have warned me? A performance for an Australian curate who has seen Negro men only in the Saturday films of childhood?

“I brought you some biscuits, but you're not allowed them.”

“That's what you guys call cookies, isn't it?”

“That's right. Biscuits.” With any American you were always likely to end in a discussion about idiom.

“Twice-cooked,” said Gervaise. “Bis-cuit. That's what it means. Double cookies. I cherish the thought.”

The terror which had been in Private Aspillon during the siege and arrest seemed to have moderated in him. His body looked languid and untautened. But even as Darragh thought this, the muscles showed below his shirtsleeves and Gervaise began weeping softly. It looked such a manly, frank grief, empty of artifice, that the idea revived in Darragh that despite all warnings from Captain O'Rourke, some special effort must be made for this noble delinquent.

“Gervaise,” said Darragh, extending a lean, white hand to rest on Gervaise's wide shackled wrist, a lily laid on anthracite. “I'll call the Lidcombe priest for you. What else can I do?”

Gervaise Aspillon, briskly drying his tears, declared, “This is all my silliness.” He gestured towards the roof of the guard hut. Then he laid both cuffed hands on the table and talked at them. “A man who hasn't traveled makes great journeys. Louisiana to California. Wow! And greater journeys still. Long Beach to Sydney, Australia. Across an ocean which just manages to come to an end. And see, a man's been through the mirror, over the equator, stewing on deck, broiled down below. And at the end, back in nice waters, the land comes up on the horizon and reaches out like the arms of God. And a man thinks, I am born anew in a different place and under a different law. It's new and it's grand to drink in white folks' bars and public houses. And the girl is well-favored and she says, ‘Hello, Yank,' which is very funny and strange and turns a weak head. So this weak-minded nigger from Louisiana is thinking he must be good as whites here. I converse with this white woman. This girl. This cloud. This good woman with a hairdo from heaven. And no one comes up with rope or rifle to punish me. Or so it might seem to a simple man. But a fellow forgets, Father, there's lots of Aussies don't really like that, and there's mean Southern boys in the MPs. Punishment is punishment pole to pole. So the light's dawned for me. The light has dawned!” He wiped his eye with his massive chained hand. “I broke laws written and not written, and I pay. Here, same as back home.”

“But you're going through a legal process, aren't you? Captain O'Rourke says you'll get a jail sentence.” For Gervaise seemed to be conjuring up a more absolute punishment than that.

“That's true,” said Gervaise sunnily, “I'll get a sentence. But it's funny, a lot of black men who go AWOL over white women end up hanging themselves in prison. An astonishing number, you'd say.” And he smiled, shook his head, and decided to wink at Darragh, whose stomach turned.

“No, Gervaise,” he said, full of fury against any hand raised to Private Aspillon. “It won't happen. I'll come and visit you each week. Captain O'Rourke will keep watch over you . . .”

“Okay,” said Gervaise without conviction. There was a frantic silence for a while. “But I'm out of reach here, in the stockade. The MPs know how to tell army chaplains a consoling tale. ‘Prison's just too hard for them darkies,' they say. ‘They're like that, you know, and it's damn sad but can't be helped.' Don't tell my friends anything I've said, except you saw me looking pretty well.”

“It's iniquitous,” Darragh murmured, and Private Aspillon did not reply. Again, would God permit such flaws within the legions of right to go unpunished on the battlefield?

Gervaise said indulgently, “It's kind, but you can't keep visiting me. The army won't permit it. And it'll upset the Chaplains Corps. And there are men in the towers or in the tents now, watching us, and they say, ‘How did that nigger get a priest in to visit him and confabulate at length?' ”