‘Jesus asks us upon what we will build the foundations for our houses. Will we build them upon sand, swept away by the
power of a storm? Or will we build them on rock? Upon what, upon WHAT, will you build your foundation...?’
Nine and a half months after his first sermon, Joe disappeared.
Or died.
As it turned out it was one and the same thing.
Lee told Peter that he had taken the blame for it. His father had taught him well enough to take responsibility for the things for which he was responsible.
Joe’s sermons had turned Pentecostal businesspeople with mansions into overseas aid workers. His spit and fire-breathing message, his voice in the wilderness making the path crooked for the comfortable had made Pentecostal teenagers pull out their ear buds. Those happy-clappy, aren’t-we-all-so-pretty-in-our-designer-jeans-and-Christian-rock-band-hoodies had opened a soup kitchen in downtown Hoppers Crossing. It fed thirty-five people every night. Some of the soupies wandered in from the paddocks. Like the Stevensons might have if they hadn’t been receiving so many Coles vouchers. And that was a good thing. It had meant Lee didn’t have to be around sweaty, grog-screwed old men in crunchy coats at Salvo refuges anymore.
The family changed. Joe didn’t, of course. But the rest of them did.
A clan of reformed happy-clappy teenagers gave Molly some clothes. Beautiful dresses.
‘She’s never needed them before,’ Joe had said, cooking stew on the burner. They’d moved to a new station, Lestona West. They could smell the sea at night. A shopping hub and car park were right across the road. They were closer to Wayfarers, which meant less travel. Joe was preaching every week.
‘She’s never had them before,’ Penny had replied as she’d chopped strawberries and peaches, fresh, for dessert. She had a new breadboard to slice the fruit on. A gift from Della.
Molly had looked amazing. A pale lemon dress with thin straps, washes of white through it. Like a granita. Her shoulders were brown.
‘And it’s good she’s never had them before.’
‘You don’t know anything Dad!’ Molly had cried and she’d run along the semi-enclosed platform. There were still evening commuters around, dashing this way and that. Wondering what this girl with brown shoulders, a new dress and a pretty face was all about, shouting across the tracks to a man hunched over a burner.
‘I don’t know anything,’ Joe had muttered. ‘Yes, that’s right. I don’t know anything. I don’t know a single thing about this crooked and—’
‘—you don’t have to preach tonight,’ Lee’s mum had said. ‘It’s Monday.’
Joe had scooped the beef and vegetables from the pot with a plastic ladle and thrown it on their plates.
‘Every day is a good enough day to speak your mind.’ Penny had worked some stew into her mouth and chewed. ‘They’ll offer you a job soon,’ she said hopefully.
‘Who?’
‘The Wayfarers.’
‘They won’t see me for the dust I’ll wipe from my feet if they offer me a job.’
Lee’s mum had groaned and they’d all eaten their stew.
The Wayfarers did offer Joe a job. Associate Pastor.
‘Church council approved you in less than five minutes!’
Della’s red lipstick looked pink under the church foyer lights.
‘That’s flattering,’ he said. ‘But I’m not taking it.’
Joe had preached twenty-six times at the Wayfarers. Morning and night services. After the night gatherings, he drank mugs of instant coffee in the church function room. The rem-nant, wide-eyed disciples sipped along with him. Mainly young men. In their polos and pale blue jeans, they cleaned the collection plates and put music players into docks before church services, pressing buttons and starting up love songs to Jesus. They stacked away chairs after services and washed dishes. They dusted. And as a reward, it seemed, Joe gave them extra preaching after his official duties.
He seemed, in fact, to only do the regular preaching to give him an excuse to talk to this wild-eyed bunch. Their clean cut and smiling faces gathered around the tables. Listening intently even if Joe was only saying he needed another coffee.
Lee sat bored in the corner. Reading the Kierkegaard he would be quizzed on afterwards while his father stalked the tables. Joe even lay down on the carpet between them sometimes. Shouted from down there. Banged his fists. Yelled about foundations and the system they were all trapped in. If they didn’t get out in a hurry, it would swallow them whole. Like a snake gulps mice.
‘...like quicksand rises to your ears before you even know if they’re on your head to hear with...’
Joe tossed new parables into a gospel salad. A gospel Lee had heard his whole life. A gospel he was so sick of he could have pulled each hair from his forearms as he listened. Those forearm hairs were in greater abundance, he noticed. More hair everywhere now. Joe saw. And saw Lee blocking his father’s gospel out. Lee thought Joe would get in his face about it, but he didn’t. He just gave him more and more books to read and report on.
‘This is Nietzsche. You need to understand the enemy, son. But don’t imagine he’s not brilliant...’
He was. But Lee liked the cover art more. A giant eating its own arm? He wasn’t sure. But it blew him away. Along with the fact that Nietzsche, someone so smart, had gone mad and killed himself. That distressed and strangely encouraged him. Nietzsche was a man, wasn’t he, like any other? He didn’t deserve to go crazy and die, surely, regardless of saying God was mad and trying to kill Him off?
‘He was a man like anyone. A man under orders.’
Lee knew his father meant the Devil. But Joe never named him.
‘Resist him and he flees.’
He gave Lee a van Gogh biography. Maybe it was supposed to be an antidote to Nietzsche. He gave him several biographies of St Francis, a bunch of capitalist and socialist economics texts, and more Orwell.
‘You need to know the system. The systems! And how to get out.’
In hindsight, Lee explained to Peter, it was easy to see that he wanted out, for sure. Out of all systems. Including his father’s.
Joe must have been watching him all those times they rode the train to Wayfarers. That’s what Lee liked to think. He wanted to think he was to blame. Because if he was, then his father wasn’t. Or at least Joe had been a little less to blame. And if he was less to blame for what he did, then Lee could understand him better.
He wanted to think that Joe followed his son’s eyes into the paddocks where the timber frames were growing. Because Lee wanted a house. With a video game console and his own room. A giant TV screen on the lounge room wall and maybe a spa in the backyard. Where he could take some of the girls from Wayfarers.
Joe must have read his thoughts. Or God had. And told Joe. Or someone at the Wayfarers had told him. Lee could never remember, but he must have told someone what he wanted. He’d had so many chats with Wayfarers after services. He’d drunk litres of hot chocolate and stared at all the white and perfect teeth. Lee thought if the Stevensons stayed around the Wayfarers, eventually they’d convince Joe to take one of the beautiful homes they offered. Wayfarers would cover the rent. Della said it once before Joe shushed Lee away.
The Stevensons visited Wayfarer homes. Without Joe. They were invited for lunch and coffee and Joe didn’t stop them. They were free, it seemed. Foolish, but free to visit the likes of Veronica and her family. She met them at a huge door that had a gold knocker.
‘Look, it’s embarrassing, Penny,’ she said, ‘This house...after your husband’s sermons. I just, well...’
Her black hair shone. She stood in a hallway of polished boards that the Stevensons could have slept, cooked, entertained and played mini-golf in. There was a set of golf clubs away up a hall that led to a giant kitchen and dining room. Veronica stared at her own clean white runners as if they’d brought her to the door without permission. Penny ushered Lee and Molly inside.
‘Oh, Veronica, don’t
worry. Don’t think about it.’
It was a Sunday afternoon. A strangely warm October day.
Veronica’s property developer husband was working. They had a late lunch in the backyard at a gun metal grey table. It was situated on the lawn and surrounded by twelve weatherproof chairs. Two-storey houses loomed over Veronica’s three fences, and two bowls of roast chicken salad sat in the middle of the table, with sides of buttered green beans and potato wedges. With sour cream. They had fresh sliced coconut for dessert.
The table didn’t attract or hold the afternoon heat. Lee touched next to his plate. Totally cool. Molly swished her fresh-combed hair from side to side for the pre-teen boy at the other end of the table. The boy’s white baseball cap was leaning to one side. As if he were ghetto. The two of them kept looking at each other. Lee laughed.
‘What is it?’ his mum asked.
‘Nothing. I’m, ah, it’s just amazing the table’s not hot.’
Veronica explained the technology. As if he cared. What he cared about was the pool. It was like something from a dream. If he could ever have a dream so brilliant. The fenced pool was rectangular with two ponds at each end surrounded by ferns. Water trickled down rocks into the pool. There was a spa at the far end, semi-enclosed by a bark hut.
They hadn’t brought their swimming gear!
Because they didn’t have any.
Veronica said she might be able to find some spare shorts of her husband’s for Lee. But she wasn’t sure how she could help Molly.
‘Don’t worry,’ Penny said. ‘They don’t have to swim.’
Lee ate the last of his coconut and noticed Veronica’s sunhat was ragged. Her black hair out the sides of it made her look like a goat. Everything else was shiny and beautiful. The manicured lawn. The hanging gardens of Babylon behind her, complete with mini-waterfalls. Her sunglasses were especially shiny. And bumble bee huge. He could see himself in them.
But that sunhat. Soft cotton, yet somehow grim. It was cream but had surely once been white.
Ghetto boy asked if he could go play Wii with Molly.
‘Is that okay with you Penny?’ Veronica asked. Molly pretended not to care either way.
‘Yes, it’s fine,’ Penny said. Her green nylon dress, seams failing in places, looked better, Lee thought, than Veronica’s hat.
His sister and ghetto boy left the table and something ticked over in Lee’s brain. That’s the way he thought of it years later, the way he told the story to Peter. Like his life had led to the decision he was about to make, a decision he took without it even seeming like one. As if it were made for him.
He stripped naked at the table and ran for the pool.
The water held him, caressed him, and took him in a cool embrace. He dived and, like a turtle looking for food, he scanned the blue paint down there. Then he realised, whoops, those times at the creek hadn’t prepared him for this.
It was deep.
He felt closed in. Yet free. He forgot about his mum, Veronica, ghetto boy and Molly. Did he even have a father?
He came up for air and dog paddled to the pool’s edge. His mum was crouched there, her face struck in horror. As if he’d pressed the button for the apocalypse. She couldn’t even say his name. She gasped as if she’d been the one struggling in deep water. Veronica stayed at the table, her back firmly against her chair. She picked up her teacup and drank. She seemed to smile, but Lee couldn’t be sure. His mum finally broke her silence.
‘Lee! Get out!’
‘It’s nice in,’ he heard himself say.
‘Get out. And get dressed!’
Veronica arrived with a small towel on her arm.
‘This might help?’
No hiding her smirk now. And was she trying to get a look through the water to see what she could see? Or did Lee just want her to? She handed the towel to Penny and walked back to the table. Penny clenched her teeth.
‘Out!’
He wanted to care about his mum in that moment. He wanted to behave well for her. Somewhere inside, he did want those things. But instead he laughed and dived under again. When he came up he looked past his mum to the upstairs window. Molly was kissing ghetto boy. And he had his hand, didn’t he, under her skirt? Veronica saw. She wandered to the wide glass doors, stopping to pat her white Labrador’s head on the way.
When his father disappeared, Penny within a week took up the Wayfarers’ offer of somewhere to live. She must have been in shock, Lee thought.
‘What about when Dad comes back?’
She shook her head.
‘He won’t be back.’
They got a house with two sinks. A kitchen with a walk-in pantry. Three bedrooms and an upstairs playroom with a view to Point Cook Beach; a narrow strip of sand and shallow ocean stretching away to nothing.
They didn’t have a pool.
Molly and Lee had bedrooms on the second floor. Hers had a big single bed with a pink doona; Lee’s doona had a Bulldogs emblem. He barracked for them now, definitely. Penny covered her red doona cover with a pattern of tears.
She called Lee into her bedroom one morning and told him she didn’t blame him. She admitted Joe may not even have known about the pool incident. So she didn’t blame him and she never would. His father, she said, had made his own decision.
‘He’s gone,’ she said, ‘and, now and forever, we have to live without him.’ Had they been doing something else the last few weeks? Lee was worried his mum had caught Joe’s preaching bug. He gave her breakfast on a tray; he’d learnt to boil eggs and make toast. They had always looked after each other and that hadn’t changed now they had a house and no father.
‘He’ll come back,’ Lee told her. ‘He’s just angry. Really angry. He’ll be back.’
He tried to ignore the dark tear marks on the edge of her doona.
‘He’s never coming back, Lee. I know him. He won’t be back.’ Penny was never wrong about anything. But neither was Joe.
Maybe that’s what they liked about each other. She brushed her sandy hair from her eyes.
‘I’m angry with him though.’
She didn’t look it. Her sad eyes were like planets wondering where the sun had gone.
‘Thanks for the eggs. They look delicious.’
Eventually, Penny cooked all the time and the smile returned to her face. Like the one she’d had on the first day they’d entered Wayfarers’ Church, only now she didn’t try to hide it.
Lee learnt to live in a house. And he stayed close with the Wayfarers. He wasn’t sure about their God, wasn’t sure theirs was the same as his father’s. And he wasn’t sure what he thought of his father’s God, either. Or his father.
Where the hell was he? Had he gone to some other church, in some other country, preaching his gospel and rounding up disciples? Was he hiding out in a cave or a little hut like St Francis?
Lee got sick of wondering. He could have filled his days with it, but, strangely, what Joe had taught him wouldn’t let him.
The Wayfarers felt they owed the Stevensons. And Lee took their pained offering: a free education at Westburne College. That education finished or destroyed, he was never sure which, the one his father had started. Lee was ahead of his peers aca-demically but a stranger in a foreign land. Like Orwell in Burma and Catalonia. He’d tried to enlist Orwell to help him through the hostile lunchtimes when mop-top boys laughed at him and tormented him, tried to recall Orwell’s words about who con-trolled the past, what the future could be if we understood it, and how telling the truth was an act of revolution in a society full of liars. But he couldn’t.
And he got tired of Orwell’s revolution. All revolution. Where did it lead? Where had it led his father? He wanted to survive on his own.
One afternoon he put Orwell’s books into a garbage bag and threw it beneath the house. His mum found it a few weeks later. Lee looked down from his bedroom window as she emptied it into the recycle bin. The books fell like shot birds.
He got a university degree. Then a tea
ching post back at Westburne College.
And his own house in Hopper’s Crossing.
It had an artful, low brick fence. Native grasses sprouted from carefully laid white stones. A sleek, grey rendered house sat behind those stones, with a wife inside and a baby in her arms. What a beautiful home, visitors said, what a beautiful family. And Lee nodded. But it was a house in which he daily felt the urge to take every electronic gadget that played a movie or song; every framed print, cereal packet or book, pile it in some garbage bags and grab his wife and child and say, Rachel, it’s time for us to move on.
‘I can’t live here, but I do. That’s what I kept telling myself, Peter.’
It was one of the first times Peter had hung out with Lee. In a god-awful bistro in Hopper’s Crossing. Pokie machines cluck-ing and beeping, and snotty toddlers screaming behind the glass of an indoor playground.
‘You like it here? In Hoppers?’
‘I couldn’t live anywhere else.’
He sipped his lemon squash and told Peter that, a few years ago, it was as if something was holding him in the suburb.
‘I mean, I knew it was my father. His memory. But it was somehow more.’
Before the news hit the media, his mum had come to his doorstep on a Sunday morning and told him about Joe. Lee had just nodded. And, strangely, had found himself smiling.
‘I wanted to tell her I was proud of him,’ he said, remember-ing that his mum had cried softly through the whole visit. ‘I know it sounds nuts, but I wanted to beat my chest,’ Lee said, demonstrating. ‘Beat it in honour of my mad bastard of a father! Only he could have come up with something as crazy and perfect as what he did. On what will we build our foundations!’
He laughed but it caught in his throat.
‘Mum told me about some strange guy in Point Cook who’d pulled apart his house and left it there.’
We. Are. Family. Page 15