by Stephen Orr
And in this William heard the whisper of his own name at Gnadenberg. ‘William Miller …’ And wondered whether God mightn’t arrive, after all, in a Trojan horse in the form of a giant Austin Seven.
Chapter Four
William and Joshua, their children at school, their wives in search of the perfect egg noodle, settled around William’s table with a small bowl of shiraz and merlot grapes. In turn each grape was squeezed, split and sucked dry. William dissolved the juice between his tongue and the roof of his mouth and smiled. ‘I think I’m ready,’ he said.
Joshua had to agree. ‘You could check with Bruno’s refractometer.’ But to William that made as much sense as checking the air they breathed, the water they drank. ‘And what if it says I’m wrong?’ he asked. ‘Ninety years we’ve made wine, without Bruno’s tool.’
‘You could make better wine.’
And again he knew where Joshua was going: quality control and time and motion, chemists with bubbling beakers and temperature-controlled processing plants. ‘As I found out yesterday,’ he offered, ‘maybe I’m a relic … still.’
Instead of getting straight to it, disinfecting crushers and fermenting barrels, repairing faulty bubblers and converting the house into a winery, he fetched a tawny port from their cold cellar (where soldiers had once searched for Mein Kampf ) and joined Joshua around the fire of Bluma’s kitchen, forever stoked, eternally warming the cottage.
After a while the talk turned to the past. William fetched his family photographs, tied up in a Blundstone boot box from his father’s day. Sacred of the sacred was a photo showing his father, Robert, helping his grandfather, Anthelm, build the walls of the very cottage they were sitting in. ‘Before then it was a wattle and daub cottage with a thatched roof,’ William said, going on to explain how, as a boy, Robert would sleep beside contented cattle under the single roof which formed their home. In the background the Muller vines were already flourishing and the half-finished spire of St John’s, at Ebenezer, was pointing towards a sky of hot north easterlies and unpredictable dust storms.
Another photograph showed Robert and Brigid, his wife, sheltering from a rainstorm inside a hollowed-out gum tree a family named Herbig had lived in for years. The back read Newly joyned in God’s eyes, 1898, Springton, B. Valley.
William pulled out pictures of himself, excitedly explaining them to Joshua as he spilt his port and mopped it up with his sleeve, pouring himself another and topping up Joshua. Photos taken by cameras he wouldn’t have in his own house: him as a part of the Lutheran Boy’s Club, a group of serious kids in overalls restoring an early Thomas Carter stripper. Bluma and her sister working at Laucke’s mill as girls, sewing up bags of flour. Nathan as a baby, being held by a nurse on the front steps of Scholz’s Willow Hospital at Light Pass. A car wreck on God’s Hill Road which had killed a young Latin teacher from town, six months out of college. Festival displays of wurst. Streetscapes. An old Turk who’d set up a trash and treasure outside the deserted Ampol on Murray Street. No one could remember anyone buying anything, until one day he was gone, taking his prayer mat and stubble with him. And finally, a serious portrait of Anthelm, clutching a Bible, now lost, in which Pastor Kavel, the valley’s founding father, had supposedly written. Possibly explaining why he’d led his followers (Anthelm barely moving out of his shadow) from Silesia to England, across seas under hostile skies to Port Adelaide. There to settle amongst the gum trees and black fellas, experimenting with new forms of blutwurst beside the River Torrens.
And the only other shot of Anthelm, standing beside his wife Margaret on a block of virgin land they would tame and make productive. Sustaining generations until Christ returned to reward them for keeping the faith. Establishing a thousand-year dynasty in which everything would remain much the same, cucumbers grown, preserved and eaten within the boundaries of their new Eden.
‘Anthelm took me further away from the church, but closer to God,’ William explained.
Because of Anthelm and Kavel, the Lutherans had been given the opportunity of bringing the true Christ to Australia. Spreading His word through Hermannsburg and Boundary Gate and a dozen other missions to black fellas, who, if the truth be known, were probably beyond salvation. But in the tradition of Luther and Kavel they had to try. When Christ returned he would ask them, ‘What did you do to save others?’ And they would have to be ready with a reply.
The last photo was Elizabeth Street, Tanunda, 1936, a whole convoy of tractors driving towards Nuriootpa. Joshua smiled and looked at William. ‘You remember this?’
But William didn’t reply, moving his glass into a puddle of spilt port and turning it by the stem. ‘God spoke to me,’ he said.
Joshua looked up. ‘He speaks to all of us, William.’
‘No, not in that sense … real words. He whispered my name.’
‘When?’
‘Hill of Grace. I was picking for Henschke. I had my basket half full. I noticed a lily and bent down and then I heard … William.’
Joshua put his hands in his lap and shrugged, unsure of a reply.
‘Did he have a deep voice?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it everywhere, or just the … lily?’
‘The lily didn’t talk.’
‘Did it say William, or Wilhelm?’
‘Joshua.’
William threw back the rest of his port. ‘I can’t remember the words exactly, but I looked up …’ He was looking for the words to explain but they were far beyond his grasp.
‘So, what did he say?’ Joshua urged, sitting forward, unsure if he should grin, or hail William as some sort of prophet. Surely if God was going to pick a messenger … still, William was a reliable man, and messengers had to be reliable.
‘I can’t remember,’ William continued, ‘but it was something about spreading the message.’
‘The message?’
‘Christ’s return.’
‘It was that clear?’
‘Yes.’
Joshua’s eyes drifted off into the rafters. ‘Like Ussher?’
‘No, that was different. He was loopy.’
William was referring to the Calvinist Bishop who, Henry had explained to them one Sunday, had made a study of the Bible and come up with the very day and time God had created the earth: twelve o’clock, Sunday the twentieth of October, 4004 BC. His chronology had even extended to the day of Noah’s flood, 1659 years later. This is what Lutheranism had saved them from, Henry explained. Dark Ages religion. The dates so misunderstood they’d even graced the margins of the King James’ Bible. But what were dates, he’d concluded? Pure guesswork. This wasn’t in the spirit of the Bible. The Bible was about two things: grace and love. And William was inclined to agree, referring to it at the following week’s Bible study as Ussher’s arrogance.
But this was a different thing altogether. He’d imagined Ussher, in his purple robes, sitting in his chambers dictating dates to feeble minded lackeys. His revelation was about the knowable, something written in every verse and rhyme of Revelations.
Joshua sat back in his chair and breathed deeply. ‘And that was all?’
William tapped his finger on the table. ‘He didn’t give me instructions.’
‘But what did you make of it?’
‘That there’s more I can do …’
Joshua shook his head. He still didn’t know what to make of it. ‘Well … there’d be no point him coming to me.’
William shrugged. ‘So?’
‘Henry says he speaks to all of us. Maybe to you his words just … clarified.’
‘Maybe?’
‘I’m sure they did.’
‘I swear. These were real words, spoken by a real voice.’ And with that he sat back and breathed deeply. ‘I swear.’
‘If that’s what you tell me, William, I believe you. Maybe he wants everybody to have the opportunity – ’
‘Exactly!’
But William was still only a little more convinced himself. Jos
hua had rationalised the news with a less than ecstatic response. If William was going to convince others he’d have to convince Joshua first.
Joshua’s revelation was nowhere near as profound as William’s or as poetic as John’s. The voice of God didn’t speak to him and, as with most people, there was nothing new about the thoughts which passed through his head: his magnolia in full flower, the lemon scent of Bon Ami washing powder, the whispers of his children tucked up in bed; the almost musical snoring of Catherine, his wife, reclining in a sofa beside him, and the sound of tobacco burning up in his pipe as he inhaled.
Joshua, alone in his living-room, was thinking of William, alone in his cottage, staring down at his linoless floor, arms on his knees, muttering something incomprehensible. The words transformed into those of Roy Rene, scratchy through a vintage bakelite radio playing softly on Joshua’s mantlepiece. She calls me dear, she must be shook on me. More lines, applause, play off, and the whole business of the apocalypse seeming so distant.
As the comedy faded to a chorus of Colgate promos, Joshua stretched back in his chair and closed his eyes. Reaching out for the tuning knob he bypassed 5AD’s gardening hour and settled on a low, gravely voice with a Russian accent. He pricked up his ears. ‘As we moved into punishment block we came across the whipping bench …’
Describing the marks of clawing fingers on the wood.
The Soviet film Chronicle of the Liberation of Auschwitz, 1945, was almost as powerful without the images. Joshua’s mind created the portable scaffold which hardly ever worked, inmates being helped back up as if they were boarding a bus. And as the voice continued, he entered a sorting house known as Kanada: piles of teeth, hair and prosthetics, reaching to skylights which would offer no liberation. Spectacles and shoes, decoy tickets which spoke of places the victims would never see.
And through all of this a vision of God started to clarify in his mind. A pile of burnt bodies, still smoking, hastily re-burnt before liberation, like a clipping William had failed to find or stick in his scrapbook. An aborted foetus with placenta, dried up beside its murdered mother.
Where was God? He was there watching, shaking his head, despairing for human beings and their inability to see him through a haze of sweet-smelling smoke. Jesus too, looking at his watch, saying to his father, How long before I can return and sort this whole sodden mess out? But God was in no rush. ‘Let them come to see me first, in lilies and Ajax, Roy Rene and the smashed shell of an old Austin Seven.’ Otherwise, he explained, there would be no point in returning. People would just laugh when he said, ‘Yep, it’s me, Jesus of Nazareth. Nazis and Baptists to the back of the room, please.’
Which meant that if he were right, William was just as likely to be called as anyone else. Eventually the words ended and a Bach violin concerto began. In the play of instruments Joshua could hear voices struggling for dominance, forming a sonority and then receding; a chorus of all instruments speaking at once, and then a single voice, clearer and more pure than all the rest.
And in this state he stood and walked out his back door, leaving his pipe on a window sill, moving down through his garden in wet, muddy socks in the face of an approaching storm. Passing through rows of Seppelt’s chardonnay the rain began to spit, and every drop was a bullet trying to stop him from reaching God: bloomers at three and six, Victas and Tony Curtis in a zoot suit. The rain bucketed down. He pulled off his socks and, feeling the energy William had tried to describe, started to run between the rows. ‘Lana Turner has written to me,’ he screamed, and a few pickers, working late by gaslight, looked over the vines to see.
‘Lana Turner, the movie star!’ he called hoarsely, trying to overcome the noise of torrential rain. Tripping. Falling over and ending up in a puddle of mud. Looking up at the sky and screaming, ‘Damn you!’ Lying back down, yielding, his heart returning to normal as he licked water from his lips. Convinced that he did have some part to play in the grand scheme of things which, all in one instance, encompassed Auschwitz and Macackie Mansions.
The next day, as he helped William pick, they laughed over the story of his muddy socks. He urged William, again, to write something down, to describe and define the time he’d been told about.
‘I have some ideas,’ William replied, ‘but numbers are unreliable.’
‘Nonetheless …’
They worked on in silence, William watching Joshua and wondering if he’d risen above the rational.
William cleaned and rinsed his crusher and his first dozen barrels of blended red, with oak chips, were placed on the floor of the wash-house to start reacting with the yeast he had added in imprecise amounts. The barrels were wiped clean and covered with old cardboard boxes, salvaged from the Black and White Cafe, to keep out the light. Within days the bubbling would begin, carbon dioxide erupting in small hiccups of shiraz perfumed gas.
As he did at least once a week, Arthur Blessitt joined the Millers for dinner: lamb chops fried black in a frenzy of improvised hollandaise Bluma had read about in one of Mary Hicks’ old Weeklies. He helped Bluma and Nathan clear away the dishes and wash up and they settled in for one of William’s epic devotions.
Pulling up his sleeves and setting out pages in front of him, William began. ‘God chooses us,’ he said, as he looked at each of them. ‘We become disciples through his grace. What am I talking about, Arthur?’
Generally a pious man, Arthur could think of better ways of letting his food settle. Still, there was no point trying to change William. When the Lord’s name was invoked you bowed your head and savoured the smell of Bluma’s rhubarb crumble, drifting over from a slowly cooling stove. There was nothing original about William’s devotion – as with Pastor Hoffmann, you stood at the right time, made the sign of the cross and recited blank verse. Maybe it all meant something to God, but it probably didn’t. There were better ways of expressing your love for the omnipotent. The full-size cross he’d started building in his workshop was an example of this. What he’d do with it or where he’d erect it when he was finished, he didn’t know. Probably he’d just re-use it for scrap. The thought of being branded a heretic was too much for a simple man of flowers.
‘Forgiveness,’ Arthur replied, remembering a similar devotion from last year. Either way, the intoning of a few simple words was generally enough to keep William happy: sin, forgiveness, love, persecution, resurrection – once he’d even thrown in sublimation, and William had nodded his head in approval.
‘Forgiveness was at the centre of the Saviour’s life, this is what his disciples learned. Unconditional and absolute. Here in Matthew chapter nine, verse nine to thirteen …’
William was off and running, rubbing the pages of Matthew between his fingers, reading slowly, as though the words might come to mean more. ‘“And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house …”’
But Arthur was off in his delphiniums, lovingly weeding between the drip irrigated rows. Nathan’s thoughts were with Lilli, recreating moments on the Seppelt hill, as foot massages became other things in anticipation.
‘Nathan?’ He heard his father’s clicking fingers in front of his face.
‘Sorry.’
‘Tell us about the disciples.’
Nathan furrowed his brow. ‘The desertion. Peter’s denial.
Things put in the Bible to teach us about …’
‘Grace.’
‘We aren’t naturally forgiving. We have to learn.’
‘And this was the lesson of the disciples?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where do we hear about this?’
William pushed the Bible over. Nathan picked it up and flicked through Matthew, as though it was the Weekly, full of stories, tid-bits and cardigan templates, words that meant little beyond the obvious.
‘Matthew eighteen, verses twenty-one …’
‘Go on.’ William sat back and folded his arms as Nathan read.
‘“Then came Peter to him and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me?”’
Arthur’s stomach gurgled and he farted into a haze of warm rhubarb. Nathan stopped reading and looked up. ‘“Children of Israel, shall we forgive …”’
Just as Nathan knew he would, William sat forward, his hands on the edge of the table. ‘Nathan.’
‘What?’
Nathan continued reading, but he caught Bluma’s smile as Arthur bowed his head in unspoken shame.
At last his father took back the Bible. As Anthelm’s grandfather clock ticked away in the hallway and Arthur sniffed for the fading scent of Bluma’s crumble gone cold, William canvassed the Bible’s views on sin, passing on to how forgiving is not the same as for -getting but how, like the twelve disciples, we had to try do both. As the tired old metaphor of the vine and the branch was trotted out again, Nathan watched as Arthur slumped forward in his chair, waking with a start sometime around the, ‘If man not abideth with me …’ line.
‘Pardon me,’ Arthur said, excusing himself again, as Nathan grinned. William looked at his son.
‘What, it wasn’t me!’
Everyone except William laughed. ‘We’re reading the Gospels.’
‘William,’ Bluma scolded, ‘your whiskers are sticking up.’
At which point the three of them lost it completely. ‘You have the spontaneity of a mushroom,’ Bluma continued, poking her husband’s belly.
‘Get off.’
Arthur had had enough. He stood up and took the crumble out of the oven, fetching a steak knife and stirring the coals for the kettle.
The following Friday, as Nathan waited with his father and mother on the Adelaide Railway Station concourse, Arthur deposited a bag of brown apple cores in the bin. Although he was way past it, Nathan read the poster for Eagle magazine as William considered a series of photos promoting the progress of the Snowy scheme. New Australians, with their single eyebrows and greasy hair, manned pneumatic drills on sheer rock faces, working for the privilege of being called real Australians.
Arthur returned via the cafe with Peter’s Dandy ice-creams in their tubs. Wooden spoons were clutched as Nathan led them towards the River Torrens. Passing the city baths as the sun began to set he said to his father, ‘This way, no turning back.’