An Angel In Australia by Tom Keneally Page B

remembering all, he still knew exactly his program for that morning. He was to hear the confessions of the brothers, and say Mass for them in their tiny chapel a mile west from St Margaret’s. The monsignor sometimes even asked him to hear the muttered lapses of the Dominican nuns one mile east, generously offering Darragh the use of his Buick for the visits, forgetting that Darragh had not yet finished his education as a driver, and was likely to clash the Buick’s silky gears and use up too much of the petrol ration, generous as it was for ministers of religion.
    He was always humbled to hear the confessions of the Christian Brothers, some of them middle-aged. Barely ten years before, he had been taught by such men. They were fellowswhose vows of poverty left them with very little except the charity of the parents of the boys they taught. They lacked a car between the lot of them. If they went to the dentist or the doctor, their superior, Brother Keogh, gave them a few pence for the bus. Darragh realised that he did not have the humility to become one of them. These were monks who had none of the powers of the priesthood. They had no altar or pulpit. Whereas with a sacred thirst, he had desired the power he had—the power to bind and loose.
    He pleaded with the Virgin Mother, the Mother of the Universe, to help him find meaning in shaving. To the monsignor’s amusement he used the modern kind of shaver with its detachable blade. The Ingram’s Shaving Cream jar was as rich a blue as the mantle of the Virgin. But he experienced no revival of spirit.
    Walking the mile in the quiet morning, a dawn which seemed safe beyond war and the hot breath of history, his throat was full of dust-dry yearning for the right kind of cleverness, the appointed mix. The Brothers’ small chapel, when he entered it, was full of blue-grey humidity and the cold tallowy smell of candles. In the little room adjoining it, which served as sacristy there, stood a small confessional stall—a chair and a kneeler facing each other and, above and between them, a red drape which protected the face of the penitent brother from the gaze of the confessor. By virtue of his having been chosen for the task of absolving them, he encountered aspects of these brothers of the teaching orders which he had never suspected when he was a child under their tutelage. So many of them pleaded to unkindly and demeaning words, and the ones who did seemed to be the men least likely to have uttered them, and thus were those most awake to a child’s feelings.
    He was surprised, not at the level of his reason, but in that part of his soul where he was still a boy, to find some older brothers,advanced in their careers, still troubled by the flesh, by disbelief in what they were doing, and in the case of one brother, by the death in the crash of a bomber of twins he had taught. It was clear to Darragh that the brother felt for these two the way a father would for his sons—that in another time and place, he believed he might have fathered two such boys. The horror of their blazing deaths had altered the maps for this good, honest, unambitious man.
    Some of the older brothers suffered what he now knew to be the standard feelings of loss of faith, of having been abandoned by God. Men who had felt themselves to be intimates of Christ and His Mother had lost that familiarity. This, Darragh told them as he had been taught to tell them, was the pain which arose from the end of one form of closeness and the testing beginning of another, less obvious nearness. He knew this because he hoped it was true; a mere endurance trial, and happy revelations soon to come.
    One monk confessed to being attracted to the mother of a pupil. He had received kind words from her, and they had tormented and exhilarated him.
    And now, on a morning when he was least prepared for it and had thought he had already heard the chief sins of the community, there came another