The Submerged Cathedral (10 page)

Ignatius, who had taught him about healing scabs and setting bones and bringing down fevers and liniments for a scald. Who taught him more than his own mother did about love, about love.

For a year or more, he could kneel and pray only to Ignatius, could not believe in anything less substantial. In the infirmary, everything had been touched by the old man's hands.

He could pray only one prayer then, one sentence – from the Song of Songs, but in Anthony's mind it was only ever in Ignatius's phlegmy voice:

Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.

 

He moves across the dark linoleum to the young Martin, lying there in the narrow white bed. Who wanders the ridge when he should be working, who fasts without permission, who is bloated up with grief. Anthony holds him out a cup of tea, sets it down on the bedside cabinet.

And as he leans he whispers, ‘Do not cry, I am here.'

The young man, this Martin, stares at him and then under his breath mutters something Anthony cannot hear,
but he knows it is meant like a slap to his face. He holds Martin's hand in both of his for a moment, then smoothes the bedclothes.

Love is stronger than death.

W
HEN
M
ARTIN HAS
recovered from his fast he moves back into the dormitory, away from the smells of disinfectant to those of farts and bedclothes, to the snoring and the scratchings, the grunts and wheezes of forty sleeping men. And to those things not spoken of in the confessional: the dark urgent breath of a young man drowning in lust and loneliness, the whimpers of dreams.

In the dormitory he misses the clean light of the infirmary. He had begun to enjoy watching the infirmarian's hocus-pocus each day, his little bottles, his handfuls of herbs, as though antibiotics have not been invented. His breathless leaning over the mortar and pestle like some jowly apprentice. Martin does not dwell on that moment's warmth in the man's rough hands over his.

Oysters. Inexplicably, obscenely, and after all this time, he has a craving for oysters here in the weak winter morning's sunlight. Ice still feathers the ground in the shade, and beads of melted frost pool on the sills where he is washing the library windows.

Once at Pittwater they had borrowed a small boat and motored up the Hawkesbury to a tiny green beach and levered oysters from the rocks. At the edge where the bush met the sand they had sat together, prising and gouging at the ancient grey forms, bending their butter knives. Then the soft popping click as each one opened and the oyster, silver-green on the blind white shell. Taking one into his mouth to taste all the ocean rocks and beaches of New South Wales.

She had lain on the blanket and he'd caught a whiting, walked to her holding the invisible line high in one hand, the fish arching and moving at the end of it. She'd been sorry for it, its distressed flapping. And he showed her the effortless death, the sudden blind butt between its eyes with the handle of the knife. He had gone back to cast the line again into the waves. When the fish was still she watched it closely, said it was ‘a beautiful silver thing', wanted to take a photograph of it.

But then it had revived, and begun flapping, half-crawling, on its side. She'd called him back to the
poor thing
, then looked away as he'd tried again to kill it, in the
end ashamed, stabbing it roughly with a knife, gashed and blood-covered.

That afternoon they sat among the trees in the falling dusk drinking beer from a bottle, and they stared around them, listening and watching the ticking undergrowth.

He thinks the men here would say the
presence
that day was something sacred, that God was the reason for their silence there, being surrounded by Him. Martin had thought it was only the painted glass curtains of the bush, on and on, enclosing them. But now, remembering, he feels a shift, wonders if perhaps there was something holy there.

But in the next second his fingers are only cold and sueded from the newsprint, and there is nothing sacred, he is only a window-washer in the cold light of this blighted farm. He is a tussock-puller, flagstone-scrubber, a drudge for somebody's idea of a god, and in the evenings when he reads their holy books his eyes blur and layer the lines of type, the letters lift away from the paper and slide over one another, and he clenches his jawbone to stay awake.

In the evenings Martin reads. He meditates on the words. What does it mean, to meditate? What does the word mean? He walks the spindly weatherboarded cloister around the darkening rose garden. Words rise up
and spread out in his mind, their parts mixing and unscrambling like Scrabble squares. He thinks his intellect is failing him, falling into disuse.

By the second year he craves a dictionary. Not the library Oxford, to which he sneaks in the evenings with his pile of remembered words. He can't retain all the definitions in his mind, or return to them when he needs to. Or else the definitions are meaningless.
Cloister
: a covered walk, esp. of a monastery or church.
Faith
: confidence or trust in a person or thing. He wants a dictionary of his own, to own a dictionary, an elaborate, many-volumed, personal, only-for-his-eyes dictionary. Once he would have laughed out loud, and hard, at the idea of this being the thing to fantasise about for months on end. Not sex, nor cigarettes, nor brandy. Not coffee. Not the feel of money in your fingers. Not even speech, now.

A dictionary that told you something of what you looked for.

He is sick from wishing.

 

There is a railway track through the property, and the men pause sometimes as they work, listening to the train at their backs, trying not to imagine the people inside, those wives and children they will never have. The lives
they will not see, returning from simple journeys they will never make.

In the paddocks at marking each year the lambs gather in nervous clutches with the sheep. The wind is icy across the flats and the iron cradle is freezing even through his gloves. What St Francis would make of it. Men in robes and working aprons, tackling lambs with all the weight of their bodies into the dry dust of the sheep yards, forcing them kicking and braying into the cradle for mutilation, the anxious mothers waiting beside the fence. The stunned lambs skittering drunkenly once thrown onto the grass, stumbling and bloody. A murderous scene, the men head to foot in blood, the medieval whine of the cradle, the shocked animals, tipped out as bloodied rubbish.

Martin used to think medicine was about knowledge, and faith about ignorance. Under the weak Australian winter sun, all intellect sunken away, he wonders why Christian men have not believed in that foreign word,
karma.

At the end of the day he can't lift a teapot. His shoulders burn. It is more difficult still to kneel in the abbey, with the smell of the animals' cut organs uncleaned from him despite the scrubbing. Once again he does not know why he is here. If he has ever had a reason that is speakable.

The next morning he must do it all again. He is hungry, in time with the stomach squirls of Matthias next
to him. In the abbey he abandons prayer. Lets out his stomach, rests his head on his empty folded hands and listens to the shrieks of the cockatoos slinging themselves across the white sky outside, and waits quietly for that other possibility. Belief.

 

Anthony watches Martin through the early years, his hands unspeaking still, his wanderings up through the bush to the ridge. At the desk beside him in the scriptorium in the evenings Anthony reads Genesis again, but some nights the words evade him and he uses the stillness to look around at the other men. Turning pages with fingers calloused from shovelling, or milking, or holding fence posts or sledge-hammering them in. Fingers clasping over the knuckles of their own other hand while they wait for God to answer them from the paper. And sometimes two cupped hands will make a private cradle for a young or old man's face, just resting there a while from exhaustion or confusion or homesickness, a cradle latticed with dark and flesh-coloured light, and all the things that writhe slowly through the hours of a monastery's day.

Yet at times he has watched it grow: an understanding of a reason to be here, settling into a man like peace. It is in the warmth of one man's hand on another's shoulder while they carry firewood, or in one slowing his footsteps
to walk in time with his friend. When Anthony feels his own reason to stay, it is like swimming. And it is the rhythm of the swimming itself, not how far it takes him, that gives him certainty.

 

As Anthony works in the infirmary's laundry, boiling the sheets, he daydreams about the Tree of Knowledge, as he used to when a child.

What a tree that must have been. Vast, and stretching skywards, gold-encrusted, and lava flowing down it, and hanging in its branches visions of all human history's ideas. What a cacophony! With the birds, and insects climbing in and out of all invention. Think of it: the Eiffel Tower, and now rocket ships, and electricity, and the telegraph, and inventions of every other kind – radio waves, and cosmic photographing instruments. And it must have spread the size of a continent, at least, to hold all human knowledge in its limbs.

The water boils. Anthony pokes the sheets under with a stick, and thinks of all the languages of the tree, and all Leonardo's art, Picasso's, and all of New York City, the ships to get there, all the wars and all religions of the world sprouted there on its limbs. And trigonometry, and Marie Curie's spectacular hatchings. Yes, and DNA helixes, and antibiotics, and my God, did they see atomic
explosions, Hiroshima burning, in it? In this tree, the tree of all knowledge?

And those two poor new-made fools standing beneath it, bamboozled.

He lifts the sheets out with the stick, steam filling the room. Thinks of Martin breathing next to him in the scriptorium, head bent over a book, frowning.

Anthony hefts the steaming sheets into the wringer. It does not concern him that none of them will ever know anything. He thinks bamboozlement is a sort of grace.

A
CROP DUSTER DRONES
overhead, on its way to who knows where, dropping fertiliser or something else to rain down on the land. At the water pump Martin is sweating, though now in the midst of a year-old drought the air is drier than ever. Anthony has told him there is a mouse plague in the northern states. The plane scours the sky overhead, above these times of famine and plague and strange raining air.

Those years ago when he worked in Sydney the city was scandalised one silver afternoon by a harebrained pilot flying his Cessna under the Harbour Bridge on a dare. ‘Just like drivin' a car,' the young man drawled later, when he'd landed on a Griffith farmer's airstrip. Grinning for the local paper with a piece of rice stalk sticking from his mouth and braces holding up his trousers. The rice-farmer
clapping his back and laughing.
‘The best pilot since Pontius,' said Griffith farmer Mr Alex Downey
, read the caption.

Anthony has told him there is only one novice entering this year. ‘A different kind of drought,' he had said, peering at a yellow dishcloth in his hand after wiping dust from his dark glass bottles over the sink.

Martin had not answered, but returned to his rosary, counting the years and the months and the days he has been here. Wondering about the shape of the world now beyond the boundaries of this particular knobbled blur of earth.

He remains fearful of the gloom of the dormitory in which he still wakes amid the muffled noises of the sleeping men. Most remembrances have long ago begun to fail him. Sandra's face, and Ellen's, have turned opaque. The road to the mountains house has become any road he ever drove. Even Jocelyn's face fades in and out sometimes. But this other unwanted image still rises clear and strong. A perfectly formed dead child held naked in his hands, glistening and warm from his mother's slowly breathing body. Over the years in his dreams that weight has become a stone, or water, or seaweed, or earth. Anything but that sweet wet armful of someone else's lifeless child.

He takes this memory with him when he visits the old hillside grave, buries it there with his prayers every time.

L
ENTEN WINDS COME
sailing over the paddocks.

Thistling for the seventeenth day. The mattock thuds into the earth, he levers it with calloused fingers and palm-flesh, the musty blade tears at the stubble's roots. Thuds, then tears. Thuds, then tears. Thuds, then tears. Takes a step. Thuds, then tears.

More than four years here and he thinks he may be beginning to know the edges of a vast god.

In the evenings he climbs the ridge to history, to the baby's grave. Gets to his knees and sits there on his haunches, enclosed among the trees and breathing in the earthy air. He thinks he may have learnt what it means to pray, here. But still he asks the air for the thing he knows he cannot have.

Coming down the hill he sees young Frank, sweeping the porch, watching him. He tries to catch Martin's eye as they file into the abbey.

Martin ignores him. This new boy is particularly annoying, he moons around after one brother then another, flattering them in schoolboy whispers, offering bits of gossip. No doubt he has been thrilling the others with news of Martin's wanderings in the bush, despite the abbot's latest warnings.

Days later, chipping weed from the paddocks, Martin sees Frank bobbing nearer to him across the dead flat. He keeps working, silent. The boy is at his side, smiling, dropping his mattock lightly to the earth, moving about in a mime of work.

His fingers flicker, signing to Martin that he wishes he had a secret place to pray like that. The dark band of the bush ridge rises up behind Frank's sweep of arm. Martin stares. But decides the boy is all speculation and false humility, and ignores this invitation.

He straightens up to toss the thistles into the barrow.

Frank leans in, turning his head to look Martin in the eye, whispers, ‘I envy you.'

Martin breathes, turns from the barrow, closes his eyes. Swings the mattock high, and it comes down cutting hard into the earth. Oblivious, Frank is still talking: he cannot be as true a brother as Martin, he has too many doubts, is not as strong in his faith.

Carefully swinging the mattock, Martin begins therosary, loudly, inside his head. He straightens, meets Frank's gaze and stiffly gestures silence,
work.

Frank smirks and nods, twirls the mattock pole in his hands. And then, keeps on: he cannot speak to the abbot on this matter, prayer does not help. ‘You could help me, though, perhaps, if we could talk.'

Martin, all quiet fury now, lifts dead thistles with his hands into the barrow. And then lifts the barrow handles, pushing it striding over the paddock away from the boy's whining voice.

Frank smiles after him with his pale blank face, then the smile falls away, and he turns, listless, back to his mattock.

At Vespers Martin sees him across the gold light given off by the pine pews. Closes his eyes, prays the stupid boy's face from him. Opens his eyes and sees Frank open-mouthed, singing about him like a child. Feels tightening in his jaw.

Another afternoon, at the henhouse, stooping in under the roosts for the eggs, Frank starts up. ‘It's a sin, I know. But really it's just admiration. I don't understand how that can be a sin?'

Martin mumbles to himself about the eggs. He turns and chickens flail upwards. The dusty air.

Handing the warm eggs over to the young brother he sees the raised, adoring face.

‘I mean, it's a good thing, isn't it? I can learn from watching you. Everything being so easy for you. In the nicest way.'

Frank is confidential, twittering, flirting.
He's fucking blushing.

Martin knows that any god should strike him dead for what he does next, does not care. The witless Frank held swaying in the chicken wire, the smoking air, Martin's snarling into the boy's face – hears the years of silent rage in his own voice: ‘EASY! Just fuck off, you pathetic little shit. Go home.'

Poor Frank's mulleted face, his stupid child's eyes springing tears, sprawling in the chicken dirt, the dropped eggs broken yellow pools in the dust, his habit rucked above his adolescent knees.

Martin spends hours in silent shuddering, begging forgiveness down on his knees, in private, in the church. Wishing away the words, the hands round the boy's thin shoulders. Knowing Frank will never forgive him, Jesus, God will never forgive him.

He has wasted four years, was getting so close.

And now what?

 

Frank, sniffily, comes to him months later. Says he has found it in his heart, with God's help, he draws it out, the abbot has helped him … to forgive him. And Martin gets down on his knees in the grassy dust, kissing the hand of this silly boy who may be his salvation.