The Memory Tree (11 page)

When it came to religion, they agreed to disagree. After all, he was a foreigner and no-one can help the way they were brought up.

He was gentle with Sealie. Called her Little Miss Twinkle-toes. She loved to hear his stories of far-away America and of the beautiful flowers and butterflies he saw on the Pacific Islands.

‘There were butterflies with wings this big,’ and he’d stretch his hands wide. ‘They were a shiny green with gold and black. Like jewels, they were. Called birdwings. You can guess why.’

‘Tell me about the one that landed on the man’s nose.’ Sealie giggled in anticipation.

‘Well, we were all sittin’ quietly. We’d stopped for a rest, see—and suddenly one of them big butterflies came and landed on my buddy’s nose and—’

‘And its wings covered his whole face!’

‘They surely did. He looked like a man with a butterfly head.’ And the little girl and her big, black friend roared with laughter every time.

It was two years since her mother had died and Sealie’s naturally happy disposition had reasserted itself. She had her friends, her ballet, her secret collection of boxes (well, Cassie knew about them, and Jenny and Angela, but no-one else). She had the doting attention of her father, of Mrs McLennon and now Godown, who sang songs and told funny stories. Life was good for Sealie then.

Zav was nearly fifteen and while Godown tried to win him over, he was met with an increasingly hard core of resistance.

‘Would you like to listen to my new Louis Armstrong record, Zav?’ Godown asked one evening after dinner.

‘Got better things to do,’ came the sullen reply.

‘Zav, how dare you speak like that!’ Hal was tired of his son’s open dislike of their guest. ‘Go to your room.’

‘I was going anyway.’ Zav slammed the door, and immediately regretted it as Hal let out a roar.

‘Xavier! I will not allow such rudeness. Do you hear me? I won’t have it.’ Hal flung the door open, and as he fled up the stairs, Zav heard Godown’s soothing tones, drawing his father back from the anger that abated as swiftly as it had come. ‘Sorry, Godown,’ Hal muttered. ‘I don’t know what’s come over him lately.’

‘Just growin’ pains, I guess. We’ll pray for his safe passage through the turbulent seas of youth.’

Meanwhile, Zav simmered in his room. His father paid more attention to that man than he did to his own son. Zav didn’t want Godown as a friend or mentor or whatever he thought he was. Sealie could giggle and dance all she liked, but Zav wasn’t going to perform tricks for anyone’s attention. He was popular at school, smart, a good athlete—what more could a father want? Zav punched the wall. Hal wanted his son to be baptised into their crazy church; that’s what.

‘What about Sealie?’ Zav asked when his father first broached the matter. ‘Why don’t you ask
her
to join you and Holy Moses?’

‘Sealie hasn’t reached the age of reason, yet, Zav. You have. That’s why I’m
inviting
you to the waters of baptism. No-one’s forcing you.’ Hal’s heart lurched with love as he looked at the beautiful boy, tall and graceful in his coming manhood. ‘You see . . .’ He stopped himself and frowned. ‘Don’t let me hear you being disrespectful to Godown. He’s a good man.’

Was Godown Moses a good man? If
good
relates to intention, then he certainly was. But the cosmos is perverse. And the way to hell is paved with good intentions.

6

G
ODOWN’S THEOLOGY HAD TAKEN
a few turns before he met Hal. As a child he had attended a neighbourhood church as notable for its preaching as it was for its music. The church was the centre of the community and Godown’s religious education began when he was a baby, lulled to sleep by the old spirituals.

Before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave
. . . his mother would croon to her little Moses.
I’m troubled, I’m troubled, I’m troubled in mind
. They were so sad, those songs, and although little Moses was imbued with that sadness, it was tempered, even conquered by his belief in the verities of a lived faith.

The preaching in his childhood church was thrilling. Great, purple-hued voices called upon the congregation to be saved. To confess their evil ways. To open their hearts. The boy sensed the terror and grandeur of the sweeping phrases long before he grasped their meaning.

As he grew older, he began to understand that the Elect would be saved and the rest would be cast asunder. That teeth gnashing would not be out of the question. It wasn’t difficult, this idea of Election. In his narrow circle of acquaintance, it was obvious that the Elect were those who attended his church. The outsiders included Red Lafayette the Communist, George Jones the publican (and his customers), Tom Burt who beat his wife and children and Grandma Wilkes who drank and cussed like a man, boasting, furthermore, that she was the great-great-niece of John Wilkes Booth. Every Tuesday, regular as clockwork, she’d threaten to shoot the President. Empirical evidence like this is not to be ignored, and when the Spirit finally moved in him, Moses felt a smug satisfaction that he was forever set apart from assassins, wife-beaters and drunkards.

In 1942, at the age of nineteen, he joined the army, finding among his buddies not only Catholics and Mormons, but outright heathens. What was worse, he wondered—to follow the wrong religion or to have no religion at all? He began to worry. So many of these young men were kind. They loved their parents, wives, children. Gabriel Mortimer, a Catholic, actually went out of his way to help Moses when he was sick.

‘Get back to work, you fuckin’ freeloader,’ the corporal shouted to the feverish Moses. ‘Them latrines don’t clean themselves.’

Dazed, Moses staggered over to the ablution block and found Gabriel by his side. ‘You set down over here,’ he said to Moses. ‘I’ll get ’em done in double-quick time.’ He winked. ‘Just have a mop in your hands in case that pain-in-the-ass corporal comes by.’

Moses sank gratefully onto the seat and watched as Gabriel set about his task. It was things like this that made him think. Here was a good man, who, likely as not, was going to hell. It didn’t make sense.

‘What do you guys believe?’ he asked Gabriel one day. ‘Like about church and stuff.’

‘Well, we believe in God, of course. And Jesus. And we get to go to heaven if we live a good life. We sort of stock up on grace, you know, by doin’ good stuff.’

Moses was intrigued. ‘So what you
do
makes a difference? Not like us. We say grace is a gift. Ain’t nothin’ we can do to
earn
it.’ But he went away and thought some more and decided that the idea of Election was a bit tough. He would much rather believe that his buddy Gabriel could join his angelic namesake in heaven. Or even that Grandma Wilkes could withstand the clamour of her genes and earn enough grace to slide into Paradise.

An aside here on grace. Our family seems swamped with it—there was Paulina’s and Aunt Sealie’s grace of movement; there was my grandfather and his strange guest, seeking grace from God; and there was me, Paulina Grace Rodriguez. With all this grace abounding, you would think we might have done better, been luckier, warded off the evil eye. As it turned out, all the grace in the world made not one scrap of difference.

Incrementally, Moses’ faith was becoming modified, customised to what he saw and experienced. It was just another step to adapt his beliefs to what he
wanted
to believe. Everyone around him was having fun. That’s how it seemed, anyway. He had led a sheltered life, what with his religion and all, so apart from some adolescent fumblings and a wholesome courtship with a girl called Delia, the pleasures of sex had passed him by. He meditated upon the injunction to
go forth and multiply
and found that it slid smoothly into his new canon. This promised to make life a good deal more pleasant.

He was well liked in the corps, and his army buddies took it upon themselves to see to the missing links in his education. They took him to Texas Nell’s and asked the madam herself to instruct him. Nell, a woman who enjoyed sex, taught him not only how to enjoy himself, but how to give pleasure to a woman. He was a quick and enthusiastic learner. A natural, she used to say. Soon he was so popular with women that his buddies gave him the name that had stuck ever since.

This was an exciting time for the newly named Godown. It was as though he were making up for all his youthful yearnings, all those years of self-denial in a matter of weeks. He was lean and muscular then, with the energy and poise of an athlete and a poet’s soulful gaze. He was an ardent and skilful lover. And he was soon to go into battle. This confluence of elements was irresistible, and in the last months before embarkation, Godown spent most of his spare time in the company of women. Slender lily-women, women with child-bearing hips and feather-bed breasts; mulatto, white and black women; women gentle, fierce, cool, passionate, joyful, melancholy; and one huge woman with overflowing flesh, whose laughter ricocheted around the small room where he licked honey from her breasts and belly. Godown laughed along with her before he began to cry. She mothered him then, sheltering him in the warmth of her breasts where he wailed like a baby.
I don’t want to die
.

‘Course you don’t sweetling. God will take care of you. He’s a loving Father to all his lost children.’ But Moses was now painfully aware that his God, the God of the Bible, was not best pleased with scarlet women and he took his Bible seriously.
Flee fornication
. It was there in black and white and what he was doing certainly wasn’t multiplying as exhorted in Genesis. Having lost confidence in his own predestined salvation, he suddenly saw that this meant he had work to do. In the face of death, his new belief in grace and salvation by merit was confirmed. Truly fearful of dying in a state of sin, he sank to his knees and prayed. He prayed especially hard the night before they left for their unknown Pacific destination.
Lord, if it please thee to save my miserable body from Japanese guns and bayonets, from malaria, from the temptations of the tropics—
just to be safe, he added,
and friendly fire—I will leave aside lascivious thoughts and dedicate my life to Your Will.

The Lord
was
pleased to save him from these perils and that’s how he became founder and Pastor of the Church of the Divine Conflagration and cleaner/security at The Perfumed Garden where he was often sorely tempted to break his promise.

When he came to live with Hal, Godown was a lonely man, striving to fulfil his promise to the Lord. His former wife had moved on, and any tenuous social links he had in Australia were friends of hers. He could have gone home, but he felt that the Lord had placed him in this Egypt so that he might lead its people to the Promised Land. Why else was he called Moses?

The Safouris felt vaguely sorry for him, but their own battles absorbed most of their time. Apart from the whores, they were the only people he knew.

The day he met Hal had been a trial. Business was slow, and when he returned with the broom he was greeted by three of the whores draped suggestively over the sofa.

‘Want a good time, black man?’ Lila purred. ‘Three times the fun for the price of one.’ His body responded as strongly as his mind resisted and he stood in agony, holding the broom.

‘Can’t get it up, big guy? Let me help,’ Lila winked at the others. ‘Even god-botherers need some fun.’

Godown closed his eyes and groaned.
Lord, help me resist temptation
. He wasn’t aware that he had spoken aloud.

The girls laughed, shrugged on their robes and sauntered off.

‘Tell the Lord not to worry,’ Lila sneered over her shoulder. ‘You don’t think we’d let a dirty nigger touch us.’

The big man clutched his broom with both hands and bent his head. He was sick with fury and humiliation. Wearily he put away the broom.
What sort of life was this?
He was overwhelmed by a terrible longing for home and, for the first time in many years, wondered what happened to Delia, the girl he had kissed so chastely as he left on the early morning train on his way to serve his country.

His meeting with Hal, then, was a means to friendship and family and he thanked God every day for his good fortune. How to repay Hal’s kindness? Godown Moses had only one gift to share—he would save Hal and his family; teach them the Word of God; show them how to earn the Lord’s Saving Grace.

He began with Hal, of course. Hal was clearly a man who needed direction in his life, solace in his sorrow. Hal’s spirit was haemorrhaging and Godown, as God’s agent, would heal the wound and make his friend whole. That first night, as they sat by the fire, when Godown offered to unlock the springs of Hal’s sorrow, he had no idea that he was embarking on the work of a lifetime.