A Boat Load of Home Folk Read Free Page A

whose smile blew in and out like a flame in wind, “that’s only a little fella sin.”
    â€œI get tired,” Father Lake said, “of the belief that adultery is the only sin. Oh, those endless sins of petty sex.” The brown and white eyes rolled non-comprehendingly in their sockets. The white teeth split the face apart. He was tempted to disenchant at one stroke and say
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but he only went on. “There are others. And to me, anyway—” (“Say kiddo, I’m not the Pope,” he wanted to add in his contrived American)—he smiled instead—“deliberate unkindness is the worst sin of all.”
    â€œKilling?”
    â€œUnkindness.”
    They laughed because they believed he was making a joke. He wasn’t though. “It’s very unkind to kill anybody,”he added, staring gravely from one to the other. Giggles burst like crackers.
    â€œStealing?” shouted a bigger feller. “Stealing?”
    â€œUnkindness, too.”
    Their laughter was almost uncontrolled. One little boy had punched a bigger boy in the stomach with sheer pleasure at the nonsense.
    â€œLying, lying?” they shouted. And they all took it up. “Lying?”
    â€œNow that is kindness to one’s self, make same fella happy.”
    He laughed with them. “Now that’s not tolerable is it?” They didn’t understand again. “That’s wrong.”
    The cobalt layer of sea gradated into air that seemed to split apart into yellow pips of light, and under this monstrous broadcast of heat-seed Lake sensed the paste that his body oozed trickle from under his panama down to his open shirt front, from the waistband of his trousers down his thin flanks. Jimmy and Edward Peter moved their amused polished faces away from him but not before he had patted their departing vulnerable shoulders. All kidstakes, kidstakes, he assured himself, watching them and the church and the next religious layer above that, the presbytery, and beyond that again and sedately aside, the bishop’s residence. One more year before leave, he counted. Only the one. And he recalled all those other priests who had said, baffled, “But this is home. We hate to go. We don’t want to. Where else is there?”
    I want, he thought. I want and want the dehydrated streets of my birthplace with the flies and the palms and the canopies of figs and the milk-bar Saturdays of my youth and the coffee-shop evenings of first adulthood and the packed warm bodies of the midday rush hour that were ever so the way, the truth and the light. Between his teeth he whistled a gut-stirring tune whose words he could never remember, only the faces of the young couple who had sung it in the Lantana one evening when he had dropped by for a drink. The first, he recalled, and only the one he had assured himself at the time, although the one had stretched like the miracle of the loaves and fishes and had become ten or eleven. It was his little weakness. Not his only one, but the first obvious and pertinent crack in his priestly career. His bishop had cautioned him afterwards.
    â€œDear father,” he had extreme-unctioned, “you must endeavour. . . .” He became lost in vine growths of embarrassment. “Their ways are not our ways, as it were.”
    He fiddled with the folds of his soutane. Father Lake made one or two protesting and apologetic noises which Deladier ignored, allowing his streaked eyes to glance away through the tropical garden to the unconverted brilliance of the bay.
    â€œOne does not have to have leprosy to treat it,” he said. A native, yelling compliments, was running past the banana fence in pursuit of a pretty girl.
    â€œOne does not wish for it,” the bishop added reprovinglyafter the vanished couple. “One does not wish. One does not wish.”
    Lake found that he was holding his left hand in a terrible grip from the right. He observed this