An Angel In Australia (30 page)

‘This is where it happened?' he asked tentatively, looking for signs of distress in Darragh.

‘This is the place.'

‘Doesn't seem possible, does it? I mean, it looks so ordinary.'

About a hundred yards away, a woman and some children turned the corner from Rochester Street. It was Mrs Thalia Stevens, around whom her five children cavorted like hectic minor planets to her sun. She held two-handed a large, unfashionable black handbag and a bulging string bag hung from her elbow. She was not like her late friend, Kate Heggarty, a gracious dresser—her green dress, her black coat and her lacquered black straw hat hung crookedly on her. Her ankles bulged like a promise of old age over her scuffed shoes. She paused at her gate to draw breath, while one of her sons somersaulted up the pathway to her door. Darragh told Henry to move further up the street. ‘Just here,' said Darragh. ‘I won't be a second.'

He knocked on Bert Flood's door. No answer came, but an instinct told Darragh the house was inhabited. At last the door opened.

‘Oh,' said Bert, taking in Darragh's sports shirt, suspenders and blue trousers. ‘You, eh? How are you, Frank?'

Darragh exchanged the pleasantries. Bert watched him closely, but in a new way, the way you might watch someone who had been marked by unlikely plague or preposterous chance. Darragh said, ‘I came to thank Ross.'

‘Oh,' said Bert. ‘Want a cup of tea?'

The inexpressive generosity of Bert would until recently have brought on stupid tears. ‘I'm sorry, Bert,' said Darragh. ‘I've got to get on. I just wondered if Ross …'

‘Well, look,' Bert said, his gaze wandering in a philosophic way, as if the answer were in a corner of the garden, a quadrant of the sky above the Western Line. ‘It's lonely here. The old Rossy's gone off to Cobar. Working in the copper mine out there.'

‘No,' said Darragh. ‘Isn't that terrible for his lungs?'

‘Oh, he got a job as tally clerk. I think the party wants him to ginger up the union out there. You know.'

‘Do you have his address?'

‘He's going to write when he's settled.'

‘When you do, I'll write to him,' Darragh guaranteed.

‘Okay. You know, he's pretty upset about everything. It was all a shock for him, too.'

Darragh grasped Bert's hand, and shook it.

After Henry delivered him to the presbytery, Darragh had the exciting feeling of being a trespasser in the familiar yet forever changed hallway, and on the stairwell. Everything looked, in fact, resonantly different. The parlour, the dining room he had shared with the monsignor, his room with its desk. He set to work packing his clothes and his small library, his devotional pictures off the wall. He cleaned out the drawers of his desk. Here, he was surprised to find, lay three pages of blank parish stationery which ages before, or more accurately, after Easter, the monsignor had signed in case there were problems at the bank about the rollover of a money bill, and the finance committee needed them. Darragh gathered these and took them downstairs. ‘I wonder could I use the monsignor's typewriter just before I go?' he asked Mrs Flannery, and after a moment's consideration, she consented.

The letter he typed over the monsignor's signature was headed To whom it may concern, and declared that Mrs Thalia Stevens of 33 The Crescent, Homebush, was a practical Catholic in good odour with the parish. He took one of the parish envelopes, addressed it to Mrs Stevens, and pocketed it for posting on the way home. Then he carried the accumulated rags and pages of his priesthood out to the boot of Mr Henry's car.

After Fratelli was found guilty, Darragh could not sleep for dread. He returned to the doctor. His dosages were increased, so that his tongue swelled once more in his dry mouth and impeded his speech. It seemed horrifying now to Darragh that Fratelli would suffer the sorrowful mystery of asphyxiation, the gross bemusement of a cracked spine. Relieved of saying the office, Darragh spent hours in his boyhood bedroom saying rosaries for Fratelli, the Joyful, the Sorrowful, the Glorious Mysteries, all fifteen decades of ten ‘Hail Marys', an ‘Our Father', a ‘Glory Be', no sooner ended than he began again and fell asleep at last, lolling forward on his swollen tongue, his head on the coverlet. His mother wanted to take him to Katoomba as the vicar-general had suggested, to a guesthouse above the great pit of eucalypts which was the Jamison Valley. But he fought her off and delayed her. On the eve of Fratelli's execution, a set of militia conscription papers came addressed to Francis Patrick Darragh.

‘This is a total mistake,' said Mrs Darragh. ‘I'll speak to the vicar-general.'

But Darragh was relieved to be distracted from Fratelli's execution, and went down to Old South Head Road, caught a tram to the city and enlisted in the army that very afternoon. A priest was automatically laicised, he knew, by joining any of the armed forces, except of course with episcopal permission, to become a chaplain. But if the archbishop could laicise him at a mere word, at least Darragh could laicise himself by signing his name to enlistment. So the equation of justice in Darragh's head ran.

‘You won't have to worry about the conscription papers now,' the recruiting sergeant told him. Darragh was to report to the Sydney Showground the next morning. ‘Bring a suitcase to put your normal clothes in,' the recruiter told him.

On the morning Fratelli died, Darragh filled his seminary suitcase with his banal clothes, and was at the Showground even before the hour of execution.

I
N
A
UGUST
1943, when it was known that Australia, still very much in mid-struggle, had nonetheless been definitely rescued by the valour of its citizens and the strength and gallantry of their great ally, Darragh was stationed as a corporal medical orderly at a hospital in Popondetta in New Guinea. It was a beautiful place on the northern side of Papua New Guinea's central spine of mountains. It possessed a foothills charm. The Australians had driven the Japanese from the southern shore of New Guinea back over these mountains and into the northern lowlands. Americans had landed on the Solomon Sea shore to take the Japanese from behind. The latter seemed no longer miraculously ordained by God as victors and punishers, but were still strongly dug in on the kunai grass plains which characterised the north coast of New Guinea. North of Popondetta, dreadful, intimate conflicts occurred along the roads driven among the giant grass of pre-war plantations. Men stumbled back from these encounters with bullets through their shins, or lumps of shrapnel in their bandaged heads, or raving with killing infections—dengue fever or cerebral
malaria. New Guinean natives often guided them along, as they winced or raved, to the hospital of the 2/14th Field Ambulance. Gangrene and effulgent tropical ulcers, concussion, shell shock, and dizzying fever temperatures had taken their minds from them. In that condition they were often terrified, expecting attack at any second. The Japanese and they had inflicted dreadful, rampant fear on each other.

By the time they reached the hospital to which Darragh was almost inevitably attached—since he had been honest about his background, and since being a medical orderly seemed to be the best thing for a priest on sabbatical—many of the soldiers no longer knew where or who they were.

The climate was so much more pleasant here that sometimes Darragh, off-duty, would climb the hill above the tented hospital, where—for reasons known only to engineers—the deep latrines had been dug. Recuperating men, waiting to go back to the viciousness in the long grass, called it Shit Hill, and its minder was a sullen orderly who sat on oil drums reading American comics and, when he considered the disease peril from the pits had reached a certain point, throwing in gasoline and setting fire to it. Men swore that he had done it when they were occupying the seats, and burned the hair off their arses—but that was merely a story, for the fellow lacked the capacity to make a myth of himself.

Darragh sometimes went up there to look at the vaporous mountains behind, and the hazed vistas stretching away across the plain to the Solomon Sea. At some moments, far from the wards and the airstrip, Shit Hill was a tropic idyll, and could even, in the evening's advancing blue light, seem a backwater. But now and then he drove down with other orderlies to collect medical supplies from the airstrips at Buna and Gona, where
terrible battles had been fought earlier in the year, and Darragh would inspect the faces of the black soldiers who unloaded the planes and looked after the aircrew messes there. His letters to Camp Kenney had never been answered, nor his letters to the Corps of Military Police. An Australian corporal did not merit such replies.

From Shit Hill one afternoon, Darragh saw yet another damaged soldier being walked up the trail by a New Guinean in a loincloth, for delivery to the 2/14th. The soldier, it became apparent as he got closer, was not so much walking as being directed and carried, as was the normal procedure anyhow. His faced seemed blackened with ash and sweat. Darragh descended the hill to go on duty.

The medical officer diagnosed the soldier, a second lieutenant, as suffering from well-developed cerebral malaria, and put him on a drip of saline and sulfa drugs. Darragh was to take his temperature at three-hourly intervals. The man's body was washed by Darragh and another orderly and as he was settled by flickering generator light on his hospital cot, his features became distinguishable to Darragh. He was at once recognisable as the brother—Howley, or some name of that nature—who in the days before the fall of Singapore had fled his superior and his confessor. Since he became disturbed when Darragh tried to place a thermometer in his armpit, Darragh took his temperature anally, and it was 105 degrees. There was already peril that if he should live, his brain might not return to him.

The man was not clear-headed enough, or even strong enough, to say much. His protests were many, but they came in murmurs. One day two ragged soldiers with slouch hats and lean bellies came to Popondetta to visit him, and seemed depressed by what they saw. As Darragh changed a saline and sulfa bag, one of them
said, ‘Look after him as well as you can, mate. He's the bloody best platoon leader we ever saw.'

‘Complete bloody madman,' said the other soldier with approval of the patient. ‘In the right way, I mean.'

One night a brief remission occurred, a phase of calm and clarity, or what resembled it. The lieutenant grabbed Darragh's hand when he came with the thermometer, and declared, ‘Father …'

Darragh said, ‘I'm just a medical orderly, son.'

But the lieutenant said, ‘Father.'

‘I can recite the Act of Contrition for you,' said Darragh.

‘The rites,' said the young man. ‘Please. The rites.'

Though all fluid was voided from the young officer's body, by way of hectic sweats, as soon as it entered his system, there were somehow compelling tears on his cheeks. Where did they come from? They were summoned by profound contrition, by urgency on a ferocious scale.

Darragh had been suspended, by archbishop's decree and by becoming a soldier, from giving absolution. He was far removed from the holy oils. Some chaplain or other down towards Gona would have them, but would take a greater time to get here than the brother who had disgraced his order but honoured his uniform had left. Yet the urgency and distress in the man were compelling.

The distant cautionary stories recurred in his imagination. The drunken renegade priest who consecrated the contents of a bakery shop. Who anointed the prostitute, in ironic charity, with butter.

And yet, Christ, bending and writing in the dust as they taunted Him with the woman taken in adultery. Christ who sanctified the dust with His Aramaic hand. Who made a sacrament out of banal things.

In any case, Darragh absolved the young officer, and for lack of chrism, and depending on the spaciousness of Christ, got some lard from the cookhouse and anointed all the lieutenant's organs of sin behind the pulled mosquito nets of a night-time military hospital.

Men perished suddenly of such diseases. You visited once, and there was some way to go. You visited them an hour later and some sort of quiet paroxysm had run through them and left them vacant. It proved to be the case now. As he cleansed the body, he thought of the lard and wondered, how can I get back to what I was from here? Later, he would need to go to Shit Hill, and look out in the clear dawn for signs and indications.