Office of Innocence (23 page)

At that moment of pain, his anger departed. It occurred to him to ask what he was doing, brawling in a street, after hotel-closing, outside a dead woman's house. It means I must now take what he gives, Darragh concluded. Dull and vivid blows one after another. I am at last submissive, he declared to himself, with the faintest glow of pleasure and a large fear of coming impacts.

But some ministers of mercy were all at once there, holding him firmly by the shoulder, dragging Trumble off, and crying, “Hang on! Whoa there! What the bloody hell!” Once he knew he was safe from further blows, he could tell at once these two men were plainclothes policemen. They wore the suit, differentiated only by minutiae of pattern, which Inspector Kearney wore. They wore the same hat from Anthony Hordern's. Darragh saw the younger of the two men give Trumble a very effective crack across the back of the head, involving not just the fist but the forearm as well, and delivered with the laziness of long practice. “What the fuck are you doing, Trumble? Beating up priests now? You ought to be fucking interned, you prick. Sorry, Father. Pardon my French.”

They were all saying that these days, all the profaners mild and heroic, even poor old Bert Flood. In this case, Darragh lacked the breath to forgive the policeman's French.

The older policeman told Trumble he was on a warning, he was watched, he was to go home. He ought to keep a bag packed too, because bastards like him could be interned any second. Just as well old Joe Stalin was on our side now, the younger suited cop remarked. Only thing that saved Trumble's rotten bloody bacon. “Unless you want to prefer charges, do you, Father?”

Darragh found the breath twice to say no. The older copper said he thought that was wise in these circumstances.

“What circumstances?” Trumble challenged.

“Well,” said the younger policeman, nodding towards Kate Heggarty's house.

“I didn't see him come out of there,” said Trumble, showing his solidarity with Darragh against the police.

“Don't argue with the bastard, Cliff. Haul off to buggery, Trumble.”

Trumble gathered his limbs, disordered by conflict, and began to slouch homeward up the Crescent. Still living with Bert Flood, it seemed. Brothers in lost love, of one kind or another.

Darragh, breathing, sore in the head but subject to no more false flashes of light, concluded the detectives wanted to get rid of Trumble because he did not hold any real interest for them. With him, their manner had been that of schoolteachers who subjected a bad student casually and daily to their contempt. But they found him, Darragh, more interesting, he surmised. “Do you have a car here, Father?” asked the older policeman.

“I was just out for a walk,” said Darragh. It was so obvious—he knew from all the Saturday-afternoon matinees that the murderer always returned. He could see in the older policeman's eye that this must be a valid principle, since there was a meaningfulness, and he turned to swap that meaningfulness with the younger policeman. Both of them were older than he, and wise according to their way.

They said they had been keeping a watch on number 23, Mrs. Heggarty's house. Indeed, their car was obvious now, under the embankment. Of course, given that the guilty did return, the police would keep their vigil, just as in the films. How could he have felt so unobserved? “We saw you go in.”

Both men then introduced themselves to him with a careful, wooden etiquette. The older policeman Soames, the younger Blainey. Darragh could tell instantly from a particular kind of incomprehension the secular always showed that they were not Catholics. There was no malice to it, rather a sort of wary astonishment. Priests were so used to seeing such manners in those who were not of the Faith that some older clerics said you could tell, from the sanctifying grace in the eyes, who was and wasn't a Catholic. But to Darragh it was all a quirk of perception. Catholics knew how to fit a priest into the landscape. Others did not.

Soames asked him, “Why did you go to number 23, Father?” Again, a little incredulity in the “Father,” arising in a man of perhaps fifty years who found himself calling a man of twenty-seven, bruised and in a cardigan, by that strange and potent honorific.

At once it was apparent, as pain faded, that there were no reasons that could be expressed to a plainclothes policeman. A sort of wisdom told him to be frank.

“She was a parishioner of mine. I came to pray for her soul.”

“Oh yes,” said Soames. “But you could have done that in the church. At St. Margaret's.”

“At Mass. And in the church. That's right,” said Darragh.

“Do you usually come to the house of a dead person to pray?”

“Sometimes before their death. Sometimes after.”

“Yes,” said Soames, in a deadly neutral way. “But you're not wearing vestments or any . . . you don't have your collar . . .”

“No. The truth is the monsignor would probably not want me to have come. But I wanted to pay tribute . . .”

“So you dressed as if you were just going out on a stroll?”

Darragh shrugged, conceding the point.

“But what did you think you'd find there?” asked Soames, his jaws blue even in this light beneath the brim of his hat, from the daily struggle between thorough shaving and the contrary force of his masculinity.

“I just don't know,” Darragh confessed. He engaged, by preference, Blainey's eyes. “I felt so sorry for her. Her husband was taken prisoner. I doubt I can put it into so many words. I wish I could. Obviously.” He shrugged again, but they both waited for him to annotate what he had already said. “When something like this happens, I feel anger against the man who did it. I feel disappointment that I was not able to . . . well, somehow prevent it. Find a better path.” That sounded pious, he thought; in a way the average Australian policeman would not like.

“That's in your statement to Inspector Kearney,” Soames announced, almost as a request for something newer.

Darragh said, “I can't tell you anything further, Mr. Soames.”

“You didn't interfere with anything in there, did you?” asked Blainey.

“No.”

“Did you go inside the house?”

“It was locked.”

“Do you have a key?”

“No.
No
.” What a concept for them to favor—that he'd creep into the vacated rooms! But they were right. If he'd had a key, he would have.

“You're sure you don't have a key, sir?” said Soames, suspending Darragh's clerical title until he was sure about this.

“I don't. I would have told Inspector Kearney.”

Soames said, “It's not good though, for a priest to be prowling around an empty house like that. Cliff and I are experienced fellows, Father. And all our experience says it's not a good idea, you being here like this. There are enough . . . what would you call them? . . . enough little
items
running between you and Mrs. Heggarty. I'm sure you know more ignorant fellows than Blainey and I might draw an unwarranted conclusion.”

Darragh was weary enough, ashamed enough, unsatisfied enough to tell them to draw whatever conclusion they chose. But he said nothing. More ignorant fellows were welcome to draw their unwarranted conclusions.

“We'd take you home,” Soames offered, “but we won't be relieved for another hour.”

Of course, Darragh insisted he was happy to walk home. His delivery by police car would have confirmed the monsignor's desperate sense that he had on his hands a rogue curate. And the monsignor would soon enough hear of this encounter outside number 23 from Kearney, his brother on the secular level, a kinsman in enviable, shared worldliness. Darragh nodded to number 23 and said, “I was just hoping to pick up . . .” But he was as inadequate as earlier at describing what. “That it happened . . . that's what I can't believe.”

Blainey said, “Yes. Look, you'd better get cracking, Father.”

Darragh had nothing further to say and turned to go. Soames called out to him. “Sometimes these things are done by blokes who have pretty straightforward ideas. Anger gives men and women strength you wouldn't believe.”

Kearney had argued the same way. But Darragh had nothing wise to utter in response, except another muttered good night. And so he turned back, a shadow in a cardigan, priest, brawler, disbeliever in Kate Heggarty's death, through streets where almost from house after house he could hear the performance of a yodeler on
The Amateur Hour.
Amateur hour. He had just provided it.

XIX

After saying early Mass for the repose of souls and capture of the guilty, he had a train to catch at a quarter past eight to make the connection at Central with the half-past-nine down the coast. The monsignor had his own Mass to say at eight o'clock, and Darragh met him briefly while divesting in the sacristy, as the monsignor tied his cincture.

“Monsignor, I have to tell you. I went to Mrs. Heggarty's place last night. The police found me. I'm sorry about that.” As Darragh spoke, the monsignor's face sagged and his skull beneath his strands of hair took on the seamless hue of exhausted anger.

“I'm sorry for all the embarrassment to you. But it's a shock, isn't it, to find one of your penitents has been strangled . . .”

“She wasn't penitent, that's the point.” A suspicion entered the monsignor's eye. “Are you going to Kangaroo Valley?”

“Yes. This morning.”

The monsignor exhaled. “You had better come back a changed man, Frank.”

The monsignor had had the grace to whisper, but the altar boys were beginning to sense his fury and to listen in. The monsignor put his lips close to Darragh's ear. “I hate it that I can't predict what you'll do, Frank.”

“I hate it too, Monsignor.”

For this morning, after a little early reflection, he could see the fallacy of his behavior. He had been wrongheaded enough, he confessed to himself, to think that to be a fool for Christ was better than to be wise after the manner of this earth. But he had tried to bring that trick off last night, and it had been a catastrophe. It seemed an outrageous vanity to believe that by breathing in the air of number 23's side lane and backyard he could achieve more wisdom. And if he were set on being a fool, why try to explain himself away as a rational fellow to two policemen? You could not act on some ill-advised fervor and then expect sensible men and women to accept your explanation for it, and so you were left justifying yourself, in the darkness of the Crescent, like a high school debater.

Before he left for Strathfield Station, he wrote a long note for Mrs. Flannery. If an American chaplain called, would she kindly tell him that Father Darragh had been unexpectedly called away, and would telephone him as soon as he could. Imperiled Gervaise would have to wait Darragh's return.

Changing trains at Central, he went up long stairs to the country platforms, where it seemed a thousand soldiers were bidding goodbye to tribes of women and infants. Thousands of tales here too, of loyalty and folly, and if he could absorb them all, perhaps he could compete with the monsignor and Sergeant Kearney for being wise according to the manner of this earth.

The war itself and the fields of peril were, however, north and northwest, so there were hardly any soldiers and no dramatic tension on Darragh's southward train, with its old-fashioned third-class carriages and its unglamorous No. 34 engine, the pony of iron horses. Darragh recited his office with the new energy of a self-declared parish clown. But as he read his way through the small hours of Prime, Terce, Sext, None, he was prey again to the idea that as much as he might have discomfited the monsignor and incurred the attention of an appropriately vigilant police, he had by his indefinite mission to number 23 kept faith with Mrs. Heggarty. This was in its way both a welcome and a disturbing suspicion. It seemed to compel him to further acts of foolishness and disobedience.

Beyond the window, southern Sydney factories, having rusted in the Depression, looked newly redeemed by war. Girls in overalls wore businesslike scarves on their heads, the kind Mrs. Heggarty had worn the day Darragh had visited her for tea, as they walked from one dismal industrial hangar to another. By Vespers, a vivid blue Pacific could be seen to the left. The train was rolling south of Cronulla, ascending the sandstone plateau of low scrub with wonderful mountains a little off to the west. Vast places. How could the Japanese credibly claim every centimeter of this? The British had, some 150 years before, and yet when you saw the scale of things, the coastal valleys, the ranges, the breadth of the earth beyond, the idea that possession could be asserted seemed hard to believe. If the cities fell, he imagined, these mountains would harbor rebels, exactly as in the Philippines. According to sporadic news, there were in Poland resistance groups with priests. He was taken by the allure, the grand, moral simplicity of such a life. The Japanese, though, unless he found his sure voice, would probably shoot him while he was still explaining himself, and make him an irrelevant contributor to any dissent from their world order.

Even in this reflection, he decided, lay all the contradictory impulses of his no doubt immature nature. There was a way, he was certain, to honor both Kate and his priesthood. The retreat would help him reconcile them. And after the encounter of last evening, he was ready for some such revelation. He could not juggle these questions in a world where at any stage an enraged Communist might throw a punch at him, or policemen misinterpret his reasons for being abroad by darkness in the Crescent. He must reduce his grief and intentions and tendencies to a unity of the kind which shone from the pages of that great medieval Aristotelean St. Thomas Aquinas. No more acting on wild, Platonic shadows of feeling. Unity please, for everyone's sake, dear God! And if it were achieved, he had no doubt he would more readily appease and rescue the soul of Mrs. Heggarty.

The railway line swung back to the coast. Saying Compline, reciting the “Te lucis ante terminum” by heart, Darragh saw the coal mines in the hillsides, the great cartwheels of apparatus which drew the coal trucks from below. The pits were reported to be the venue for a primal fight between the children of God and the children of darkness—Catholic Labor unionists, usually called the industrial groupers, and the Communists. Everyone knew the Communists considered the coal mines the cockpit for the establishment of the Communist state, and the Catholic men, who wanted merely social justice and not overthrow, were inevitably locked in political battle with them. Union ballot boxes were stolen or protected by armed factions, and pitched battles at dark of night involved bike chains and cricket stumps. This sunny autumn morning, however, the coal mines seemed to be exemplars of industry, the great cable-drawing wheels grinding above the Pacific.

The train dropped down to the town of Wollongong, where the steel mill sat right up against the blue sea. The coastal range was close here, and blue and dominant, and a little way south, as the train reached a bush siding, Darragh, his office completed, pulled his bag down off the wire rack and got out.

A Franciscan friar, brown-robed, white-cinctured, waited in his sandals by some milk cans on the siding. He seemed to be about the monsignor's age, and nodded to Darragh as if there were nothing remarkable about a curate from Strathfield—indeed, as if he had come to the station this forenoon more for the drive itself than the opportunity to meet such a normal phenomenon as a young priest needing a retreat.

“Father Matthew,” he said. “Got everything, Father? Good.” He escorted Darragh to a Ford truck, in the back of which sat milk cans and a bale of fodder, and told him to lift his bag into the back as well and take the front passenger seat.

The friar drove and they ground their way up verdant valleys. “The worst drought in Australian history has just broken,” said Father Matthew. “If the Japs come, they'll inherit an emerald coast.”

Darragh felt he quite liked this hard-fisted monk. He had the bullish neck of a country boy, a good footballer. He would have made a credible and authoritative pub owner.

“Your retreat master is Father Anselm,” said the monk, Matthew. “He's a really gentle old bloke. Sometimes he might seem a little simple-minded. Even our students poke fun at him a bit. But my advice is, listen to him carefully. Because the truth can be simple, can't it?”

“I hope so,” said Darragh.

“All I know is the cathedral themselves rang us, so I understand there's some kind of shadow. But a fellow who doesn't get in some sort of trouble . . . well, God loves a rebel, I like to think. I hope you have a type of renewal here. You won't see much of me, though, because I'm the bursar and I run the dairy farm.”

And his hands on the wheel could have been a dairy farmer's hands too.

“That woman in Sydney who was strangled,” said Darragh.

“Yes.”

“She was my parishioner. I'd written her some letters.”

“Boy!” said Father Matthew.

But Darragh for once was not tempted to explain further, to exhort Matthew to think the best. It seemed to him Matthew tended to.

“I just want to know when they release her body. It'll be in the papers. My parish priest will bury her. I'd like to know when all that happens. Not knowing would throw me off kilter.”

Father Matthew inhaled noisily, pleased to be safe on a monastery farm. “I read the daily paper. There's no reason I can't let you know.”

“And remember her soul in your Masses.”

“I will,” agreed Matthew.

The retreat house was also a seminary for Franciscan students, and a monastery for a number of monks. Darragh, said Father Matthew, would lead the same life as the students—silence, reflection, but on top of that a daily conference with Father Anselm. He could do a little work on the farm, if he liked, cutting the chaff, for example. The students did that sort of thing. Sometimes periods of physical labor were of benefit to the soul, said Matthew.

The red-brick monastery appeared before them amongst gum trees. With a central garden and a cloister, it looked like a 1940s attempt at encompassing the medieval tradition. The wattles in the garden still displayed a profusion of sensual yellow which St. Francis himself, by all accounts, would have delighted in. But the lanky, shedding eucalypts spread the baked clay of the courtyard with sloughed, tattered bark and thin-bladed leaves, of a type St. Francis had never laid eyes on and might have taken a little time to accustom himself to.

A muscular Franciscan brother carried Darragh's bag to his room and told him that the students were about to recite the small hours in the chapel. Putting his soutane on, Darragh joined them, occupying one of the chairs at the back of the chapel where various local laypersons who came to Mass sat during ceremonies. The students faced each other in classic monastic style, occupying stalls which ran very nearly the length of the chapel. But there were no more than fifteen of these young men, Darragh saw. They were exempt from military service even in this national crisis, but they all seemed fervent, none of them motivated by this benefit more apparent than real.

Afterwards, in the refectory, he was shown a place at the top table, where he sat in his black soutane at the end of a row of brown friars, beside Matthew and near a slim old man who concentrated fixedly and delicately on his food. Anselm, he guessed. He was to meet him at five o'clock, the official start of his retreat.

Left to himself after the monks and students walked out of the refectory, he spent five minutes in silent reflection in the chapel. The students were free to talk now and, having stripped off in their rooms, could be heard running out in football jerseys and shorts to play soccer or kick a rugby ball. Darragh took advantage of an earlier remark of Matthew's that there were first-class walks to be had around the monastery. From the escarpment above one of the nearby gullies, he had said, you could see all the way to the Pacific.

Darragh took the way indicated by a scarring of pathway on the edge of the bush. There was an implicit promise in the tree-spaced plateau that here was the room to consider at length things he had not had the time to deal with. The business, again, of reducing things to one. The touchstone of unity could be picked up like a jewel at the base of the great Australian unity of nature. So one hoped; so one yearned. Here could be unified Gervaise, the black theologian and deserter; Sergeant Fratelli, the angel of thunder; Kate Heggarty and her son, and all else. The autumn light on the track was wonderfully strong, unconditional. With the summer flies gone, it fell on Darragh like the purest mercy. He became a mute walker; no clever prayers escaped him. After two pleasantly sweaty miles, the earth fell away. He stood on a cliff of sandstone, with forested gulfs and green streams running off towards the blatant blue of the ocean. Surely, in such absolute tones and uncompromising distances, the great truth could be seized.