Read Online A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley - Free Book Online

sacristy, chancel, kitchen veranda, orchard—” He wanted badly to add “confessional” but did not quite dare. Out of his wretched blue eyes he looked sideways at the inquisitor who so far and with innate cunning had demanded nothing from Lake except the privilege of watching his disintegration.
    â€œThe laundry—er—must be very expensive.”
    â€œAh. For change daily boys,” Lake replied. “I personally live with my squalor. You know, father, I live so much with my inner and outer squalor in such intimacy as it were, I could almost be accused of incest as well.”
    Mulgrave fidgeted and fidgeted.
    â€œA time and a place,” he murmured. “A time and a place.”
    â€œActually,” Father Lake insisted, “I use the poor-box money for my laundry. Mulgrave would have told you, wouldn’t you, Terry? Only I cook the books.”
    Greely repressed his annoyance and fiddled with the coffee crystals, a refinement in this place that he found ludicrous.
    â€œSometimes” (oh, you persistent fellow, he inwardly accused himself) “I have been so desperate I have had to get shickered to cope. Brandy, father? Terry? And one evening—I’ve wanted to talk about this, because it’s rather rich, really, Greely—one evening coming past Landauer’s bakery, I was so tired and fed up and drunk—screaming drunk, not just your sad little one too many—I leant through the window and passed my hands above the underweight loaves and what do you think I did?”
    He waited. His eyes were full of something. It could have been tears of one kind or another.
    â€œI consecrated the lot.”
    No one looked up at the blasphemy. Greely coughed and gazed at the banana thicket where someone was moving in an intelligent and furtive way between light and shade, leaf cover and space. There were poetic antitheses of all kinds in glimpses of sleek brown skin, petulant face and a string bag lumpy with yellow fruit. Johnny Terope was on his way to the Tucker-Browns with offerings of a placatory nature. In that spasm of a second Mulgrave was seized with the vision of endless bread-rolls, starch-reduced, sliced, wholemeal, sacrosanct, passing out through the hot shuttered window counters of the Port Lena pure foods bakery into the shanty and thatch huts of Port Lena—and he wondered, even as he winced, at the real nature of this.
    â€œIntention,” said Greely. “You did not have the right intention. There has to be the impact of sacrifice. Onemust be offering within context. Anyway, are you confessing or boasting?”
    Lake smiled contentedly. Imagine having the real presence with peanut butter!
    â€œIt’s the thought that counts! I’m all packed, you know, in anticipation and ready to climb on the first plane out. Actually I’m prepared to do more than that. I’m going back to chuck the lot.”
    Forced into discussion before he was ready, Greely munched rather savagely at a broken fingernail before he ventured and then:
    â€œThat has not yet been requested. You’re an extreme fellow, aren’t you, and presuming authority’s lack of charity?”
    â€œDo not, I prithee,” Lake said, “give me that damned crapulent spiel. In twenty years of ecclesiastic rule—in twenty years—I am a spry forty—I have never been conscious of great gouts of this substance falling as the gentle rain from heaven. Except for one man. Years ago. A small country town run by the masons and the Children of Mary sodality. He was a fine priest because he still retained his gentleness. He was good to animals and people in genuine distress. He did not mind sinners and he knew how to endure. Yes. Endure. He was such a practitioner, you know.”
    Explicably Lake began to sob into his sleeve, then his grimy linen handkerchief, and between his grubby heavings managed to stagger his body to the railing where he bent over to