Office of Innocence (28 page)

“Look, Ross,” Darragh said, leaning forward, getting down to business. “I'm not a soldier because I'm a minister of religion, exempt. I believe you're 4F. I'm not saying this in any jingoistic way—I don't want you to go and get killed or anything like that. But it's just, you seemed so strong the other night, when we were having our . . . our little scrum . . . down the street.”

“I
am
4F though, fair and square,” said Trumble. “Had tuberculosis. And bad. Part of a lung gone. That's where I met Rosie. Up in the Boddington sanitarium in the Blue Mountains. It's easy to die in a place like that, but I thought, Build yourself up, son! I even chopped wood to the limit of what breath I had. And I wanted to live. Because wars always bring on a revolution, so I knew this one would too, if I could just stick around.”

Darragh was tempted to say, “Perhaps it'll be a revolution against Stalin,” but he didn't want to get into that argument.

“So I can hold my own,” Trumble concluded.

“I think you can too.” Once more a polemic urge surfaced in Darragh to ask, “Can you really imagine the whole of Australia Communist?” But that would alter the direction of the conversation. He said instead, “I came because I want you to do me a favor.”

“Here we go,” said Trumble with a broad smile, but again it had a jolliness to it.

Darragh told him about Private Aspillon. At least Trumble believed in the universal brotherhood of men, said Darragh. He and Darragh had that in common.

“But,” said Trumble, “you've got to ask whether it's wise for a black man to strike up an acquaintance with a white woman. It's all bloody right in theory, but . . .”

“But society doesn't like it?”

“Bloody right,” agreed Trumble, suddenly like a gatekeeper of the known world.

Darragh expanded on his experience with Aspillon, leaving out the more pious aspects. Aspillon was now in a military prison, and Darragh claimed to be interested in his welfare. So he was to meet an American MP in a pub in the Cross, and he wasn't sure about the fellow, not after the events in the backyard in Lidcombe. He wanted to make sure he got home safely. Would Trumble consider coming? Except, said Darragh, he wasn't asking Trumble to take part in the dialogue. If he wouldn't mind sitting across the room, and just keeping an eye on things. They'd go into the Cross by train and bus. “And I don't want to come home too late,” said Darragh. “I always have the early Mass Monday.”

“Sounds like exploitation to me,” said Trumble with an enthusiastic grin. But the invitation had fascinated, and as far as Darragh could tell, delighted him. “Look, not only will we have a good night out on this Yank, and not only will I keep an eye on you, we'll get a cab home. It'll be easy to get a cab home if a Yank's with us.”

“Well, I'll pay for it,” said Darragh, in a rash burst of gratitude to Trumble. It would make a massive dent in his savings from the one pound ten shillings the archdiocese paid him a week.

“No,” said Trumble. “I can handle it. It's good pay at the brickworks now. The capitalists want what we produce.”

He winked, and so it was agreed that the priest and the brickworker would meet at half past six on Sunday evening, at browned-out Homebush railway station, and it was Trumble who seemed more concerned about guilt by association than Darragh. “One thing,” he said. “Let's both catch it as individuals, and link up once it's on the way. I don't want to shock any of your parish people.”

“My parish people?” asked Darragh. “Or yours?”

Even so, Trumble seemed so hugely tickled that Darragh himself felt partially appeased for the dreadful afternoon, partly reassured that the human species could be repaired and redeemed. In that spirit, he let Trumble pour him a second glass of beer.

XXII

As the monsignor had foretold, even Darragh's half-past-six Mass, a Mass recited in all-green vestments and designed to accommodate the early risers—the penitential, the insomniacs—was considerably more crowded than usual. Some 350 or more of the faithful, he would have guessed. The sermon he had prepared the previous night had been enriched and armored by his alliance with Trumble.

The gospel of the Mass, which Darragh read from St. Margaret's pulpit of paneled native cedar, seemed crowded with omens and significance, perhaps to too great a degree. Christ, smelling bitter persecution in the air, warns his followers, “They will put you out of the synagogues: yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he does a service to God. . . .”

He surveyed his congregation. Fortunately, not too many families at this time of morning. They were certainly attentive. Their frowns were the frowns of goodwill. He addressed them as priests were meant to. “My dearly beloved brethren.” He began to speak of the incident of the adulteress, as related by St. John. Jesus was on the Mount of Olives, approaching the Temple of Jerusalem, whose stones would be in one generation tumbled by the Roman army. And the “scribes and Pharisees,” the members of priestly factions in the Temple, brought him a woman who had been arrested for adultery and said, to test him, that Moses's law decreed this woman must be stoned to death. “But what sayest thou?” Christ bent and wrote in the dust of the ground, as if He did not hear them, but they kept pressing Him—they wanted his answer as potential evidence against Him. Then He rose and famously said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” Darragh could tell by the pale upturned faces below him that, of course—no fools—they caught his drift. They knew he spoke about the judgment which had been brought down on him by the press, and the fiercer one which had been brought down on Kate Heggarty.

“Stoned to death,” he said. “We're used to that term. We first heard it as children, at a stage when we were involved in the stone fights boys enjoy, and it did not seem too terrible a death. Consider how ferocious it was to be in the center of all the hurled stones, though, to have the consciousness slowly bludgeoned out of you, and then at last, under the hail of rocks, to breathe for the last time, and to be still. Now the men who threw the stones felt gratified, and went back in that state to their homes, unaware they had been savages.”

The congregation looked very concerned. Some seemed ready to weep in compassion. Others were agog. In the back pews one of the few children was hushed.

“The stone-throwing impulse is very strong in humans,” he intoned fairly plainly, a banal but authoritative idea since it came from him. “The papers are very good at it.” There was a faint knowing chuckle. “The
Sunday Telegraph
are experts.” A relieved uproar of laughter enabled parishioners to glance at each other and grin. Darragh felt a little abashed, since it revealed they had all read the article about him, a thought which was for a moment oppressive. “Christ realized that men with lumps of granite in their fists were not the best ministers to deal with the woman's sin. A woman who died in our parish in the past few weeks has been harshly judged in the manner of the Pharisees. It is all too human of us to judge her, because she paid the excessive price of being murdered for her sin. I believe that this woman needed our compassion and our considered help. We were not able to aid her in her daily life, to prevent her undertaking an association which has had this horrible result. Christ, who saved the woman so long ago, might have left the saving of this woman to us, particularly to her priest, and there's an extent to which we, and I, might have failed.

“I cannot think it right to judge her savagely after the fact. Let us remember that had she not suffered this dreadful result, if the breath had not been crushed from her, we would have known nothing about her supposed sin, and our judgment would be mild. It is the murderer who is the sinner. We should not burden her memory with the murderous guilt, any more than Christ saw fit to burden the woman taken in adultery with the guilt of a transgression which involved both a woman and a man.”

He felt a sudden tiredness, and, like air from a tire, the power went out of his oratory. He closed with the normal remarks about the services the faithful could provide the dead through their prayers. “May their souls, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace, Amen.”

That same sermon, in essence, he gave again at the eight-o'clock Mass, before a congregation containing more young families. Only children made noises during it.

As usual, he hoped to finish the eight-o'clock Mass by seven minutes to nine at the latest, to ensure that he had unvested and had left the sacristy by a few minutes to nine, allowing Monsignor Carolan some moments of silent reflection before he went out to the altar to say the nine-o'clock Mass. But the number of people receiving communion kept Darragh a minute or so over, and he was conscious as he left the altar and went into the sacristy that he might encounter an irritated monsignor.

The monsignor stood at the vestment bench in his white alb, with a cincture on, and a maniple at his wrist, while altar boys strained to lift an emerald thread-of-gold-decorated chasuble over his head and arrange it on his shoulders. Darragh and his altar boys edged up to the long vestment drawers, and parallel to his parish priest he began disrobing, taking off his own chasuble as the monsignor in turn assumed his. He undid his white cincture and divested himself of his stole, kissing the cross embroidered on it.

“Is it true you told people they were to blame for that woman?” murmured the monsignor.

“That is not true,” said Darragh, in a supposedly easy voice, so that the altar boys would have no room for gossip about a falling out between the parish priest and the curate. But it was sickening that the monsignor had informants amongst the congregation.

“You remember last night I told you not to mention her.”

“I didn't mention her by name,” said Darragh. “But there had to be some reference to her. If people were scandalized by last week's paper, it was up to me to stanch the scandal this week.”

The monsignor, a mountain of priesthood in his braided, threaded, looped, and glittering robes, joined his hands and sank his fine-cut nose between them in prayer. Having folded the chasuble, stole, and maniple in its drawer—you could not trust the altar boys with that job—Darragh crossed the room and threw the white alb into a laundry basket, for Mrs. Flannery always gave him a fresh one, heavily starched by lay nuns in Parramatta, to start the week.

Without looking at him, the monsignor put on his head the black four-cornered, three-peaked cap named the biretta, optional wear for priests, which older men seemed to favor more than younger, and took up his chalice in its altar cloth, one hand beneath the chalice veil, the other laid flat across the embroidered burse, the customary posture of the priest approaching the altar. Anger was still in his face. He said sideways out of his mouth, “Are you going out today, Father?”

“Not today,” said Darragh. He would visit his mother and Aunt Madge on some other Sabbath. “This evening.”

“I'm going out to lunch. I'll leave you a note before I go.”

And he progressed through the door, and Darragh heard that peculiar unified sound of an entire Catholic congregation rising as one, a noise made up in part of sundry fabrics moving, of limbs of all ages straightening, of ankles hitting kneelers, of knees colliding with the pew in front. This was the nine-o'clock Sunday Church militant, ascending in its ranks to greet its monsignor.

Darragh ate another presbytery breakfast—a boiled egg, toast—and then hunched down at the desk in his room and began to apply himself to reading the small hours for the Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension.

The psalms for the office of Prime were not particular to that Sunday; that is, they were the same psalms that priests, rattling through Prime, early or late at night, after a day in the sun, trying to make Matins and Lauds before midnight, said every Sunday. Deep in Psalm 17, a familiar verse stopped him in mid-mutter. “
Lapis, quem reprobaverunt aedificantes, factus est caput anguli
.”
The stone which the builders have rejected has been made the keystone of the arch
.

It was not the first time a text penetrated him for good or ill. But by a hand which Darragh could only presume to be divine, the steepling weight of last Sunday's newspaper shame, which he now understood had been crushing him, crowding him nearer and nearer lunacy, was gone. He could not say how long the relief would last, but the sense of being a favored child, or at least a being on a just course, returned like a gracious tide he seemed to experience even in his limbs. He dropped to his knees with an enthusiasm he had not felt for some months and offered thanks to Mary, the Mother of humankind, for her intercession, and to Christ, who had also tasted blood and ashes in the Garden of Gethsemane and written something mysterious in the dust of the Temple forecourt as the Pharisees bayed, for His divine remission of a terrible sentence. Simultaneously, he felt confirmed in his intentions to meet with Fratelli. Efficacy returned to him like the rain, which even as he knelt began to fall outside. He had heard a distant radio report that in the parched interior, from which the weather came, there had been welcome torrents over the remaining areas held until recently by drought. He felt as graced by torrents as the inimitable earth itself.

He continued with Vespers and Compline: “
Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile, ecce nunc dies salutis
. . .”
Behold now is the proper time, now the day of deliverance
. . .

By the time he came downstairs, he knew, both the monsignor and Mrs. Flannery would be gone from the house. Sunday midday was the one time of the week Mrs. Flannery did not cook, but went to eat a baked dinner at her sister's house in Concord West. The dining room was empty and innocent of cooking odors. In the hall was an envelope addressed to him in Monsignor Carolan's handwriting. “Dear Father Darragh,” it began rather formally. “Don't go out tomorrow until we have discussed your future.” It was signed “Vincent Carolan, PP.” Even that left him calm and armored in new certainty. There was a second letter, and the monsignor added a note of regret to it that he had forgotten to give it to Darragh the day before, when he returned from retreat. It carried a design of a cross and eagles, and was from Captain O'Rourke. Aspillon, said O'Rourke briefly, was in a compound west of Townsville, more than a thousand miles north. “I'm informed he's in good health. If you wish to write to him it is care of the Detention Compound, Camp Kenney, via Townsville. My unit will be on the move soon, so this is likely to be our last communication.”

Against what he knew from Fratelli, Captain O'Rourke's assurances counted for little. But for today, the amiable Gervaise would have to be committed to the care of God. Darragh had far too much else to attend to.