Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  HILL OF GRACE

  Stephen Orr works as a high school teacher in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. His first novel, Attempts to Draw Jesus, was the runner-up in the 2000 Vogel/Australian award. Stephen conducts writing workshops with school groups and was the judge of the 2003 Advertiser Young Writers’ Award.

  HILL OF GRACE

  Stephen Orr

  Wakefield Press

  1 The Parade West

  Kent Town

  South Australia 5067

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 2004

  This edition published 2011

  Copyright © Stephen Orr, 2004

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission.

  Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, designBITE

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication entry

  Orr, Stephen, 1967– .

  Hill of Grace.

  978 1 86254 987 6 (epub).

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  My father believed that grace was like cinnamon sprinkled onto a freshly baked teacake. It was like icing sugar, or dandruff, settling on people’s hands and faces. It was the love of God. As he always reminded us, grace was the potential for belief, for salvation (or so Luther had said).

  This is why William Miller ended up so angry. He could never understand why others couldn’t see such a simple thing.

  William Miller saw the world in black and white, when it was really a landscape full of yellow calendulas and a deep blue sky.

  NM

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Author’s Note

  PART

  One

  Chapter One

  William Miller believed in the end of the world.

  To him it was as real as the odour in Christ’s sandals, or all the business of water into wine. It was as real as the saucepan constellation, or the taste of his wife Bluma’s rhubarb crumble. It was as certain as a finely balanced algebraic equation or the week, or day, the autumn leaves turned on his vines.

  William Miller had gone beyond wondering, guessing or suspecting. His study of the Bible had revealed clues and facts missed by others. They spoke of a time when Christ would return and walk confidently down Adelaide’s seediest streets – through workplaces and pubs, backyards and grocery stores – gathering the faithful.

  From the day William Miller began to believe, he knew it was all just a matter of waiting: singing hymns and worshipping, playing kegel and perfecting his merlot-shiraz blend. Giving and receiving love, these were important too. Bluma and Nathan, his son, were angels with frantically flapping wings, holding him under the shoulders, lifting him.

  But none of this was as important as God, and his son, who it was written, was due to return any time.

  William stood in front of his oldest shiraz vines, rolling a grape between his fingers. With only a slight pressure the skin split and grape-juice ran down his hand. Tasting it with his tongue he smiled and whispered, ‘A few more weeks,’ recognising the unmistakable iron of his soil and purity of his ground water.

  He squinted and off, down Langmeil Road, saw a boy climbing a date palm like a monkey. The boy slipped and he held his breath. Beyond, in the near distance, he could see some fires on the Kaiserstuhl, the highest of the hills which enclosed the Barossa Valley, keeping them safe from the suburbs of Adelaide which had started creeping north like rampant lantana.

  Throwing the grape into a carpet of yellow harlequin he turned and made his way towards the house. Stopping in front of Bluma’s vegie patch he picked a dozen moths off the cabbages and pocketed a cucumber to eat after tea. ‘No pesticides, ever,’ he’d bragged to Bruno Hermann, one of his neighbours with a fetish for the perfect blutwurst. ‘Impossible,’ Bruno had replied, although William knew better.

  If William were mostly right, it was because Bluma allowed him to be. Every few months she’d dust the cabbages and hide the container in the back of her cold cellar. She would mix curry, which he claimed he couldn’t stand and wouldn’t touch, into stews he’d describe longingly to strangers waiting to be served at Linke’s butcher.

  William detested luxuries, but Bluma lived a secret life of sorts, surviving on distractions put before them by the very devil himself. Sitting beside a neighbour’s wireless, she’d close her eyes and slip into another world as Nat King Cole described love. Romantic love, that is, not the practical, toenails and all love she knew. Beyond Tanunda things were different, it seemed: men wore clothes with at least a faint whiff of style, bought books of poetry (which they read to their wives) and ate meat they hadn’t slaughtered themselves.

  Unlike Tanunda men.

  Like her husband, William Miller, talking to himself in Barossa Deutsch, scraping a cow pat from the tread of his boots with a stick that kept snapping. William Miller, with his neatly trimmed chin whiskers and his electricity-free existence. Electricity meant bills and bills meant servitude and, worse, people reading your meter, keeping your details in a filing cabinet and counting you amongst the throng. Like the army of ants which covered every inch of his old myrtle, scurrying to and fro with no apparent purpose, driving to keep moving and working until the End arrived. The End: an apocalypse of atomic flashes and sulphur dioxide – a moment which William simulated with his shit-tipped stick, bashing the trunk until there was a complete frenzy. Ants minus the message of Revelations and Daniel.

  This, he guessed, is what the End would be like – people loading their possessions into carts and car boots, driving away from the sun as it engulfed the sky, while he and Bluma knelt in a soft sea of gazania and prayed. The secrets of the seven scrolls revealed at last, as dressmakers and bakers screamed in the distance and Friesian cattle moaned inconsolably as their bodies burned.

  Imagining all this was a daily joy for William, who sat in the swing he’d hung for Nathan (years ago, when he was a small boy) and listened as the bough of his myrtle creaked beneath his weight. He started to swing in ever-increasing arcs, smiling, pushing back his head and watching the world fly by in a blur of clouds and tree tops, birds (half sound, half movement) and the smoke of the Kaiserstuhl fires. This, to him, was the End. A blur of everything real becoming unreal, as body was transformed into spirit and the world into a new heaven of familiar things: an eternity of sauerkraut, God’s reward for those who’d stayed faithful.

  The list included all of the Millers, from Anthelm, his grandfather, who migrated from Posen in 1844, to his father Robert, who helped Anthelm build the family farm. Through to Nathan, William’s own son, who would continue it on. Although there would be an End it was important the land was taken care of and farmed properly, the alternative being a heaven of weeds and Anglican idleness. The ironstone farm house William stood before was Anthelm’s legacy to him, as were the vines. The weight on his shoulders was the weight of knowing, of needing to know more, and to convince ot
hers.

  William walked past Bluma’s herbs, touching the cross on his back door and entering. Bluma was still busy in her Schwarze Kuche, a medieval black kitchen in the form of a hearth of flagstones which she stood on to cook, feeding the smells and heat of sausage and corned beef into a giant chimney-cum-smokehouse. ‘Ready?’ she asked, washing the last of the pots in a sink as deep as it was wide.

  ‘Not yet,’ William replied, sitting down at the dining-table next to Nathan and casting an eye across his books.

  ‘The Rasch’s have started picking,’ she continued, but William pointed out they were still on whites. ‘When Henschke starts I’ll start,’ he said, spreading his fingers like a web above Nathan’s algebra.

  ‘How long?’ she harped.

  ‘Two, three weeks.’

  But she knew she’d have him out long before that, considering he didn’t have the bother of chardonnay or semillon, large production runs or interstate markets.

  ‘The search for x,’ William smiled, studying Nathan’s book up closely. ‘If x is addition, it has to jump to subtract.’

  ‘I know,’ Nathan replied.

  ‘Here for instance, two step, which of the numbers is linked more closely to x?’

  ‘William!’ Bluma moaned, wiping hair from her eyes with her forearm. ‘It’s not the maths we studied.’

  ‘It is.’

  William knew Nathan understood, but he had the hankering to explain it anyway, in his words, words more fluid and understandable than any maths teacher. Words which could make sense of Baume (to everyone except Bluma), the Cartesian plane and Corinthians. Words wrapped in a gentle poetry which made the complex simple, the unfathomable obvious. And in algebra, just as in Revelations, the clues were there for those who looked: 2x + 5 equals 25. So, obviously, x equals ten, but what about more complex problems? Explained just as simply through observation – rules and patterns. What was hinted at in Matthew was repeated in Mark; what was suggested in John was explained in Daniel.

  A thorough study of the whole was necessary for an understanding of the parts.

  William took the cucumber from his pocket and bit into it. Nathan kept scribbling as Bluma drained the sink. An example of her white-work hung below a half-cured ham: Kinder, Kuche und Kirche – which might have been enough for the old Lutherans, but didn’t begin to explain her. The white thread on white cloth had grown grey and fat-stained over the years, filled with the steam and smoke of a thousand lamb shanks.

  William opened his family Bible and flicked pages through his fingers. He smelt the mustiness of old paper and, as he did every time, admired the clumsy copperplate of his grand-dad inside the front cover: I come to Klemzig in 1844 (24). I move to Tanunda in 1849 (29). I marry Marg. in 1868. Robert come from Lord in ad 1870.

  The saga continuing in William’s father’s hand, explaining how he’d married William’s mother Brigid in 1898, delivering up the child Wilhelm Muller in 1901. W. Muller, come from the gracious arms of the Lord Jesus … And William wondering again, as he did every time, if it wasn’t time to change his name back and whether Anthelm and Robert would have been ashamed of what he’d done, considering they’d retained their names during the First World War.

  Different thing all together, Bluma would console. Hitler’s war had been longer, brewing in an atmosphere of anti-kraut hysteria that had its epicentre (again) in Adelaide. Just the same, it had been six years since it all ended, maybe it was time for William to return to Wilhelm, for Miller to restore the Muller honour.

  The photos of Loveday Internment Camp were still in his mind, set out proudly on the front page of Adelaide’s daily Advertiser. And although he’d narrowly avoided a visit, the headline was still clear in his mind: Who Can Tell A Nazi Spy? Taking him even further back to a stinking hot day in March 1918, when he watched his father almost come to blows with a train conductor who wouldn’t accept his pass.

  Bluma sat down opposite them and William looked at Nathan, who cleared his exercise books and maths text and bowed his head.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Saviour,’ William began, laying aside his half-eaten cucumber as they joined hands. ‘Guide our devotion, as we’re inspired by the words of your companion Matthew.’

  As they did every night at this time, Nathan’s thoughts drifted off across the school oval to assignations more Janet Leigh than Luther, to landscapes more Picasso than Barossa. And in remembering his odd, occasional romantic embrace (mostly imagined), he contemplated a world full of more fire and excitement than anything in the Bible. As his father’s voice drifted into his ears it wasn’t Jesus he described as much as the possibility of underwear; it wasn’t the Gospels as much as a stray page of D.H. Lawrence. Not so much the tribes of Israel as tribes of atheistic Commie hordes over-running Asia.

  If Bluma was not entirely with William, it was because she knew the Gospel of Matthew better than her very own brother. She sat with her head bowed, breathing shallow breaths of smoked meat and the riddle of seventy times seven.

  William started reading. ‘“The Pharisees also came unto him …”’ Droning on until the bells of Langmeil Lutheran tolled nine and he closed his gigantic Bible to mixed feelings of relief and immolation.

  The next morning William and Nathan set off, as they did every Saturday, in search of papers and yeast. Passing by the dry stone walls near Seppelt’s, William stopped to pick a bunch of belladonna lilies for Bluma. He sniffed them but there was nothing there, only the hot, pink flowers of a hundred Tanunda roadsides. Off in the distance the colour faded to the monotony of blue gums and sugar gums and the odd river red clinging desperately to life beside Jacob’s dried-up creek.

  Beyond the Kaiserstuhl the Flaxman Valley floated olive and treeless above the horizon. The High Eden Ridge stretched east towards Cambrai, taking with it endless grasslands which were destined for the vine. So far it was just a few Angus cows, and paddocks eaten clean by merino sheep and rabbits. Dams full of brown water spotted the landscape like crater holes. Granite outcrops erupted like pimples from far below the earth, making otherwise arable land unworkable.

  As they passed the Langmeil Lutheran Church, William jumped up the few crumbling steps (another working-bee for him to organise) to the notice board. Tomorrow would be an easy day. Ian Doms was usher and Bruno Hermann, William’s blutwurst neighbour, welcomer. William could sit back and enjoy listening to the pastor, Henry Hoffmann, a Tanunda treasure, whose sermons linked the Bible to the daily lives of his parishioners in ways William could only marvel at. The way in which Adelaide became Babylon, Rundle Street the temple of money-changers and the twin towns of Tanunda-Nuriootpa themselves, a new Jerusalem. The way in which Emperor Wilhelm Friedrich became Satan (not in so many words) and Sir Robert Menzies a glowing saint on a holy card, stepping out the red devils surging down from the North. Even Premier Playford got a mention, praised for speaking out against the Asiatic hordes who’d like nothing more than to re-populate the Barossa with gin stills and opium farms.

  There were immigrants and there were immigrants. Some bringing the vine, others the rice paddy. The Greeks, maybe, could be tolerated, spreading their souvlaki song-lines down the already cast-over Hell that was Hindley Street. But hot on their heels would be the Serbs and Croats and Bulgarians with their body odour. Mandolins and the Commie manifesto in Tanunda’s Goat Square. This was the miracle of Pastor Henry, warning them against foreigners. Amongst all this cultural baggage (although Hitler was never mentioned) Pastor Henry’s thoughts were never more than a step away from Loveday Internment Camp.

  William and Nathan passed Jenke’s winery, the heavy smell of grape-must blowing over through canopies of coppiced carob. ‘Too soon,’ William whispered, watching workers in singlets unloading grapes.

  ‘Maybe they ripened earlier,’ Nathan offered.

  William didn’t answer, smoothing his chin whiskers and contemplating the A-bomb. One of the reasons he bought newspapers: to gather evidence of the End. Every Saturday, every local and national paper. Ta
king them home, spreading them out on his dining-table, scissors at the ready. Every time there was something about the Koreans or Russians, snip snip, laying them out on the table as Bluma took a pot of homemade glue and stuck them in his scrapbook, writing the date and source, wiping off the excess and smoothing them down. A Saturday ritual, sipping coffee and eating Streuselkuchen as Nathan sat in the corner with a book and just wondered.

  William believed if he gathered enough evidence about the bomb and its keepers with their belief in evolution and the need to share capital, then others would see what he could see. Man as a product of apes? The forsaking of farms for factories. People who didn’t make their own cheese or grow their own gherkins. It was all there, cross-referenced in an index: A-bomb, Automat, Barrymore, Chaplin, China, Communism, Durkheim, Einstein …

  William and Nathan entered the Apex bakery, William with his papers, Nathan with his tennis racket. William smiled at Bruno’s and Edna’s grand-daughter, whose name he could never remember, and ordered honey cakes for his whole family. Nathan, not much younger than the girl, rolled his eyes for her benefit and started kicking the strings of the racket against his tennis shoes. ‘Don’t do that,’ William scolded, reminding him how they couldn’t afford a press.

  ‘Have you heard, Mr Miller,’ the girl began, smiling, baiting him, ‘the British are going to test a bomb next year?’

  William shook his head. ‘In Australia?’

  Nathan smiled. ‘The Barossa?’

  Lilli looked at William. ‘Place up north. Middle of the desert. Maralinga.’

  As she wrapped his honey cakes and put them in a bag beside a half pound of the bakery’s yeast, William watched her fingers become the legs of a spider, crawling down from China towards South Australia, consuming everything and everyone in its path. ‘The British are too quick to be with the Americans,’ he observed, to which she replied, ‘It took both of them to stop the Fascists.’