Father Neil's Monkeyshines Read online

  “We was not far from ’Amburg, as I recall, when we was given orders to take over an abandoned ammo dump five miles off. It was the twentieth of April, a day I’m not likely to forget.”

  That interested me. I remembered Jennie saying Mark’s last letter was dated April 19.

  “‘You won’t ’ave any trouble,’ the C.O. said. ‘The Huns are running like frightened rabbits.’ We weren’t keen for a scrap. We’d only ’ad five hours’ sleep in three nights, see. Well, we’d only gone a mile when we ran into this machine-gun post. They opened up and one of our chaps dropped on the spot. We scattered and regrouped, and the captain led the assault.”

  “He led it?”

  “From the front, sir. As usual. Brave as they come, the captain. The Germans was giving themselves up by the thousand at this time. Just our rotten luck to run into a crowd that fought to the last man. They had a lot of bottle, sir.” He tapped his leg. “Caught one myself.”

  “How was the captain after the skirmish?” I asked him.

  “Like the rest of us, damned sorry to lose two of our mates. Can’t tell you more than that cos it was back to Blighty for me on a stretcher.”

  On the drive home, I said to Father Duddleswell, “One thing’s clear. Mark was no yellow-belly.”

  “Maybe he was more upset by his men’s death than the corporal thinks.”

  My guess was there was more to it than that.

  That night, I woke up with a sudden jolt. In a split second, I felt I’d found a clue as to what was wrong with Mark.

  A few months before, I’d put up an information board at the back of the church. I invited parishioners to pin up on it their requests for prayers. One evening, I glanced at it.

  A boy had written, “Please God, give me a bike for my birthday, All the best, Dave.” There were similar petitions for teddy bears and pet rabbits, and prayers sought for cancer victims.

  At the bottom, unsigned, was a scrap of paper with the penciled words: “Please pray for the man I murdered and for his family.”

  I’d been so shaken I told Father Duddleswell, who reacted furiously. He rushed into the church and pulled the board down.

  “Catholics,” he growled, “do not wear their hearts on their sleeve.”

  He was convinced it was the work of a crank or someone craving attention. But could it be Mark Holbrook seeking help?

  Yet how could Mark have been a murderer unless he had come to believe that all war is immoral and all killing is murder?

  I decided to play my hunch and, at my third attempt, Mark was willing to see me.

  After a bout of small talk, I threw off, “You did hear that Jennie Fletcher gave up her fiancé?”

  He shrugged suspiciously. “So?”

  “I heard you’re a friend of hers.”

  “Friend, no,” he said flatly. “I knew her once. A long time ago.”

  “I see.”

  I’d planned my next move with care.

  “Mark, that notice you pinned to the church board.”

  I was expecting him to express incomprehension of what I meant. Instead, he stiffened noticeably.

  “It intrigued me.” I still gave nothing away.

  As he turned from me sharply, I saw the reflection of his pale, lean face in the window. His eyes were screwed up in pain.

  I ventured my next step. “It said something about killing someone.”

  “No.” The word came through gritted teeth.

  “Murdering someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You … murdered someone?”

  He nodded without speaking.

  I never chose my words more carefully than now. “So it wasn’t like an ordinary killing in war.”

  “For your information,” he spat out, “there are no ordinary killings in war.” Then, illogically, “But you’re right, it was out of the ordinary.”

  “Care to tell me about it?”

  “I’d be grateful if you’d leave.”

  I’m a born coward. I almost did. But something told me I was needed there.

  “God,” I said, “can forgive anything.”

  He got to his feet as if to leave the room. But, with an effort, he sat down again.

  “Not this,” he responded hotly. “Anyway, I don’t want to be forgiven.”

  It sounded conceited but I sensed it wasn’t. If he was trapped in a somber world of his own, I guessed he didn’t relish his isolation.

  After an extended silence, feeling we were going nowhere, I stood up. “Before I go, Mark, I’d like to say a brief prayer with you.” I began with the Our Father.

  He rounded on me, not in anger but in astonishment.

  My words had stirred something deep within him. What it was I had no means of knowing.

  “A friend of yours,” I said, to keep the conversation going, “Tim Davidson, you remember him?”

  A glimmer of light came into his eyes and went out.

  “He told me about the assault on the machine-gun post.”

  “Sit down,” Mark said quietly. “It was nothing to do with that.”

  After a minute or two, with his fingers entwined, he began to open up.

  The date Tim mentioned was significant for him, too: April 20, Hitler’s birthday. They had taken the machine-gun post, made arrangements for the dead and wounded, and marched on to the ammunition dump. Three miles further on, they ran into an appalling smell. One of his men, it might have been Tim, said, “An open sewer.” But it was the smell of death.

  The camp, one of dozens, had been run by slave labor: Russians, Poles, Belgians.

  “When we entered the camp,” Mark said, in a whisper, “we couldn’t believe it. Only a small place, not on any map. Not in the class of Dachau or Bergen-Belsen. But we saw these couple of hundred bodies. Some decomposing. The rest all white, as though they’d been bleached. Just bones, really, piled up like scrap metal. The Germans had scarpered. We did our best to bury the remains. There was one survivor, thin as my arm. We tried feeding him. Soon as we gave him a sip of milk … We buried him with the others. My sergeant, a Scot, said, ‘I swear to God, if the bairns of the bastards who did this were here now I’d strangle every one of them with my bare hands.’”

  At the end of a long day, Mark gave his men orders to rest. He himself went to the commandant’s hut to see if any documents had been left behind and get some shut-eye.

  “I was a bit tired, you see. Well, under the bunk in my billet, a German was hiding. I could see this pair of boots jutting out. Good black leather boots. Polished.” Mark’s face creased with pain. “If only they’d been filthy and not polished.”

  He shook his head to clear it. It took him a while before he could continue. This was hurting beyond endurance.

  “Gave me, shall we say, quite a shock, Father. ‘Come out of there, you bastard,’ I yelled. He wriggled a bit but didn’t come out. ‘Come out!’ He didn’t move. So I drew my revolver … and … I shot three times through the mattress, then dragged him out by his shiny boots.”

  “A soldier?”

  Mark’s staring eyes were fixed on me but they were a million miles away. He had pictured this scene times without number till it had almost driven him mad.

  “He was in uniform, yes, but it was far too big for him. About sixteen or seventeen years old he was. He’d lost an eye—before I shot him, I mean. He had three fingers missing on his left hand, from frostbite, I’d guess, and blood was coming out of his mouth.”

  Mark couldn’t go on for fully five minutes. I had not been there, I had taken no part in this incident, but even I knew this was something that would never leave me my whole life through.

  Finally, he came out of his trance.

  “This … kid, this skinny kid, was shaking all over. Not shuddering like me but really shaking and moaning, poor lad. I knel
t down and lifted his head up and he stared at me, as if he knew I was the last thing he would see in this stinking life. And he said … he said, three times, Vater Unser (Our Father), Vater Unser, Vater Unser. Then … he died.”

  “You couldn’t—” I was going to say, take any risks.

  “Stop! Please. I murdered him. I wasn’t in any danger. The sergeant came running. ‘You got one of the buggers, sir,’ he said. ‘Lucky you saw him first.’ I said, ‘He wasn’t bloody armed, Sergeant.’ ‘You weren’t to know that,’ he said.”

  “He would have done the same?”

  “Whatever anyone would’ve done,” Mark said with a burst of anger, “I did it. I did a forbidden thing. As soon as I saw those boots, I should have left, got support, given him a chance to surrender. No, I can’t kid myself. I had a blood-lust.”

  He went through the lad’s papers. There were pictures of his four grandparents, his mother, father, and two sweet little sisters with braided yellow hair.

  “I ruined their lives, too,” Mark said, calmer now. “I destroyed the life he would’ve passed on to his children and his children’s children.”

  I did not dare speak for a long time. In my and most people’s book, Mark had every excuse for what he did. He was exhausted. He’d lost two of his men in an ambush. He had seen and smelt the evil consequences of Nazism.

  Yet, green as I was, I knew better than to make excuses for the bad deed of a good man.

  Biting the inside of my mouth, I said, “You did a terrible thing.”

  “I know.”

  Even as he said it, a strange smile spread over his handsome face, as if he had kept his secret these last six years not out of cowardice but from fear of not being understood or believed.

  He squeezed my hand in gratitude.

  “You see, Father,” he went on, relaxing further, “we were only young, but we fought because we believed in honor and justice. We’d killed and suffered and seen men die. We weren’t happy about that, but we didn’t question the need for it. But when I killed that lad, his name was”—he took time to get the name out though it was etched in his mind—“Hans, I was waging a nasty little war of my own. I became a Nazi.”

  When I felt he had no more to tell me, I prayed in Latin over him.

  “Was that absolution, Father?”

  I nodded.

  “I didn’t ask you to forgive me.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t me,” I said. “When that German lad said the Our Father with you, he forgave you as his brother.”

  When I reported back to Father Duddleswell, he sighed, “Life sometimes punishes a man for his mistakes and that can be good. But when a man punishes himself, it is always bad.”

  “What next, Father?”

  “Get him to apologize to Jennie for his bad manners, like.”

  Mark wasn’t keen. “She won’t want to speak with me.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  “You’ve met with her, Father? You have. You wouldn’t care to have a word with her for me?”

  I was fed up with being a messenger boy. “Confess your own sins,” I said.

  “That I murdered that German boy?”

  “That first. And that you ruined your mother’s life and Jennie’s,” I said brutally, not fully understanding why. “And that you murdered your own children and your children’s children.”

  “But I don’t have any children,” he said.

  “Exactly.” And with that, I left him.

  Father Duddleswell said, optimistically, “Tell Mark and Jennie to get on with it, Father Neil. They should have had two or three kiddies by now.”

  It was another two years before they married. They had to get to know the virtual stranger the other had become because of the war. They had many things to work through together.

  Once or twice, I wondered if they’d ever come to terms with what had happened to them both.

  But they won through. At the wedding, “Halibut” was best man and I officiated.

  It was a joyous if muted occasion. Father Duddleswell said, “Mark will never have it easy. Guilt is a lifelong stalker.”

  I said amen to that.

  What can be tougher than to be a hero to others when in your own eyes you are guilty of taking the life of an innocent child?

  11. Born on Christmas Day

  My experience of hearing confessions never did match Hollywood’s. In the movies, it’s nearly always someone with a dark secret, say, a kidnapper or a murderer, who confessed, often with dire consequences for the priest. The worst that happened to me was boredom, a sore neck, and the occasional minor surprise.

  I was not long at St. Jude’s, still downy as a peach, as Father Duddleswell put it, when I went into my confession one Saturday morning in the early 1950s. After a lull, peculiar noises came from the penitent’s side of the box. It sounded less like an individual than an invasion. A couple of scamps up to their tricks?

  When the coughing, stamping, and suppressed laughter had gone on for half a minute, with no mention of a sin, I got up and whipped open the penitent’s door.

  It was kids all right but not a couple. There were five little ones, ranging from three months to six years, clinging to their mother.

  This was my introduction to Meg Mavin and her family.

  It was quite a crush because Meg herself was, in the words of my parish priest, “a right double-decker of a woman.”

  Seeing her startled look, I apologized and closed the door on the six of them.

  After hearing Meg’s confession, I said, “Would it help if next time you left the kiddies with someone?”

  “Who with, Father?” Meg asked in a stifled voice. The baby must’ve had his fingers in her mouth.

  “Your husband?”

  “Ah, Bert’s at home, Father, looking after our other six.”

  I cleared my throat but found nothing to say.

  “What about my penance, Father?”

  With eleven children, what more did she want?

  I said, “Three Hail Marys,” adding under my breath, “if you can find the time.”

  “You were asking after Meg Mavin, Father Neil. A saint of God,” said my parish priest. “She married young and just kept laying.”

  Meg was thirty-five so there was no telling how many she and Bert would end up with.

  Father D was proud of that family and almost licked his lips when he quoted scripture that likened babies to an archer’s quiverful of arrows and olive shoots around the table.

  Their house resembled a village on market day. The first thing to greet the early caller was a dozen bottles of milk on the doorstep. Inside was a regiment of shoes, all polished and graded according to size.

  Bright-eyed children with trilling voices were moving in all directions. They never walked but ran as if they had just been let out of school.

  Father D warned me to always wear my oldest clothes when visiting the Mavins. I not only had to take turns burping the baby, jammy fingers were likely to be pressed against my jacket and into my pockets.

  Father D’s chief warning was, “Never visit them early on a Saturday morning. And for why? Because, don’t you know, Meg doses the entire family, Dad and all, with castor oil every Friday before bedtime.

  “So Saturday’s payday?”

  “You are quick on the uptake, lad.”

  Bert was small, calm, and quiet, with turned-up mustaches like a tame warthog. I rarely saw him. He was mostly out of the house doing part-time jobs to bolster his wages at the co-op.

  Once he whispered in my ear, “Sleep is the only holiday my Meg gets, Father, and not near enough of that. To listen to her sometimes, she must be still doing the ironing in her sleep.”

  Meg never had a washing machine, dryer, or a fridge. She did her regular wash in a garden copper and made do with a scrubbing board a
nd a hand-operated mangle that she turned like a hurdy-gurdy. The clothes were pegged out on a line propped up by the dead branch of a tree. When they were dry, Meg set to with a couple of heavy black flat irons heated on the kitchen range. It was nonstop action. Her broad arms moved with the strength and skill of a truck driver’s.

  After all these years, she remains in my memory as a kind of archetypal mother. The first time I saw a Henry Moore carving of a woman, my immediate reaction was, “Gosh, Meg Mavin.”

  She was big, bouncy woman who, on her own admission, would never make a jockey. Her legs were like packed Christmas stockings. She had almost permanently doughy arms and flour on her skirt from constant kneading and she smelled healthily of carbolic soap, cooking fat, and jam. Her idea of luxury was a pot of jam she hadn’t made herself. She was delighted whenever I presented her with a jar of homemade preserves, courtesy of Mrs. Pring.

  Bert said proudly, “She keeps this place spotless like we was moving.” Once, he touched my arm and made this improbable plea: “Keep the kids at their catechism, Father. Catechism and castor oil is our family Bible.”

  One Sunday, I preached on the joys of heaven, suggesting in vague but glorious outline the spiritual blessings that await us there.

  As she left the church, Meg said, “Heaven’s where there’s no more washing and ironing, Father.”

  She was placid as a grazing cow. She never smacked a mischievous child, or, worse, resorted to ridicule. When Tommy threw a stick and broke two bottles of milk, I suggested, “Why not give him a tap?” “I would, Father, but I never seem to have a spare hand.”

  Children would chase one another through her kitchen, throwing paper darts, and she’d say, “They cheer me up just by looking at them. Even when they make me flaming mad inside, like now, I’m so happy.”

  When one child hurt another, she first soothed the wounded one on a lap as comfy as mattress. Then she cuddled the offender with, “Aren’t you a silly chap, then? You’ll have a bit more sense when you grow up, please God,” and the little chap is saying, “I’m sorry, Mummy. I didn’t mean it.”

  The children were a handful in spite of their training.

  Jessica was at the stage of always moving in circles. “Go and get Daddy his paper, please,” said Meg. Off went Jessica to the door in tight circles and gaily down the road, the circles widening. It didn’t matter to her that she knocked into other pedestrians.