Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  Where he came face to face with Lilli coming out of the Apex bakery.

  ‘Honey cake?’ she said, passing a sweet-smelling bag under his nose.

  ‘Working?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Studying?’

  ‘Always. Although today isn’t a proper school day.’

  She smiled and raised her eyebrows, his first temptation for the day. ‘No no,’ he grinned, ‘I have two papers tomorrow.’

  ‘And a father with chin whiskers.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  She passed the bag under his nose again, this time walking off along the Adelaide road.

  Nathan stood his ground. ‘I’ve completely forgotten my cosines.’

  ‘Fuck your cosines.’

  Tempted by the smell he was off, walking through paddocks and remnant vegetation, avoiding the road with its Lutheran spies and sales reps.

  ‘Brother Miller,’ she began, as they stopped to steal ripe strawberries, ‘follow the whore to Hell. Partake of her honey cake and taste damnation, Apex style.’

  Lilli had dropped out of school years before, choosing the smell of fresh pipe loaves over the stale sweat of St John’s change rooms. She had told Nathan that her mother, Bruno and Edna’s daughter, had gone on about it for weeks, urging her to hold off at least until she found someone to marry. ‘Who will you find at the Apex?’ she asked Lilli. ‘And where will you be in fifteen years? Slicing bread.’

  But Lilli didn’t care. Things had a way of taking care of themselves. Anything but school. ‘Who needs it?’ she asked, as they kept walking.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged, unsure. ‘The marks.’

  ‘Gonna become a doctor?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Keep daddy happy.’

  He didn’t argue, wondering what he’d ever got out of school. To him it was a soccer game in which the sports teacher let the two biggest pricks pick the teams. Waiting and waiting, always picked last, which was some consolation he supposed. Then the whistle, and the three largest boys on each team holding on to the ball, the rest of the boys, like him, running around for no reason, calling, ‘Here, here … pass,’ but never getting a turn. Running and calling, for four quarters of utter pointlessness. Fetching the ball when it went out of bounds but returning it to the biggest ape for the throw in. Finishing. Smelling bad. Showering in a room full of steam and wet singlets, dicks displayed proudly like so much pickled pig. Returning the next day for more, of nothing, no one thinking to explain or wonder why. Or dreaming up a better way of surviving until adulthood.

  He tried to estimate the gradient of a hill which rose gradually above Jacob’s Creek. An ironstone cottage, overgrown with weeds, lay mostly in ruins before them, a rusted camp oven in the fireplace telling stories of Silesian pioneers fed up with it all, taking their stuff and heading back to Adelaide. They reached the top of the hill and looked down over Tanunda. ‘Hello, William,’ Lilli waved, preparing for her next transgression. ‘Me and Nathan up here, you know, ooh …’ Gyrating her hips orbitally.

  They sat in the mouth of Johannes Menge’s cave, a cathedral in quartz which had housed a monk-like Prussian mineralogist in the 1840s. For many years Menge had searched the valley with his hammer and pick for sapphires and rubies but had found none. Most agreed that he had been touched by the sun, taking his ‘walking cures’ and writing a tome in which he tried to link geology to Creation.

  Lilli handed Nathan the honey cake and he raised it to his mouth. ‘Yeast is sin,’ she smiled, but he bit into it anyway, custard dribbling out the sides, down his hands and onto his blazer. ‘That’s it,’ she said, ‘you’re going to Hell,’ transforming herself into the snake he’d always imagined her to be, as his whole body glowed with anticipation of endless yeast, and sex. Lilli the guru, completely free of hang-ups, shedding her skin like a snake in a tub of spermicide. Although in the end it was just his imagination, quivering with the nervous energy which should have been preparing him for exams.

  Trigonometric functions and chromosomes. Integers and the uterus, and oviducts and ovaries and cervix. He gave her the cake and grabbed his satchel. ‘I’m dead,’ he whispered.

  ‘Not yet,’ she smiled, stealing his old, leather satchel and opening it, producing Brodie’s Physiology of Algae and throwing it as far as she could, out into the long, wet grass which led down to Gravel Pit Road.

  ‘Christ!’ he yelled, chasing after the book, picking it up and drying it off. As he did with A History of the Black Death, Experimental Biology and Pure Mathematics 1.

  Standing up, Lilli took the last book, A Bible Atlas, tore out a page and screamed at the top of her voice, ‘Strike me dead!’

  Nathan had darted back and grabbed the atlas. ‘Jesus. That’s gonna cost me money.’

  So here they were, a week later, waiting on the platform. William stood with his hands behind his back, his head bowed. ‘How will you explain your exam results?’ he asked his son.

  Nathan shrugged. ‘Not everyone’s that way inclined.’

  Back in Menge’s cave, Nathan and Lilli had laid on the ground silently, Nathan unable to muster even a foot massage.

  ‘You can be moody,’ she said.

  ‘Lilli,’ he replied, ‘I’m still at school.’

  ‘Well go back.’

  Silence. ‘I got exams.’

  ‘Go learn.’

  And with that she started chanting, ‘“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Hare …”’

  He stood up, repacked his satchel and headed back to town. As the chanting grew quieter behind him he thought how he’d fucked it up again – a bit of this, a bit of that, but not enough of anything. Perhaps if he’d stayed, the honey cake could have led to other things. As it was it was after lunch with nothing achieved. He turned to see Lilli, back on the hill and silent now, observing his slow progress.

  Back at Tanunda station, the train pulled in and Nathan got his own compartment. Sitting down he read the reference that Arthur had hurriedly scribbled, attesting to Nathan’s abilities with his hands, his proficiency with the lathe and chisel, in cutting and joining wood without splitting or fracturing it. Suggesting they couldn’t do better than a boy with a brain like Nathan’s, a manner the Lutherans were known for and a tenacity that would put Bradman’s cricket team to shame.

  As Bluma waved at the train becoming distant, William had already walked back into the empty car park, his head down, thoughts elsewhere, bubbling up like carbon dioxide through a cracked fermenter. God would return and Nathan would be saved too, regardless of chromosomes and integers. Refrigeration mechanics were as welcome as anyone in the garden of endless pickle.

  Unless, of course, the Fechner girl got to him first.

  ‘Where were you?’ William had asked, when he found the absentee note in Nathan’s school diary.

  ‘Lilli was helping me revise.’

  ‘Where?’

  No reply, and William red-faced with a fire few of his neighbours ever saw. ‘Where?’

  ‘We went for a walk.’

  Hitting Nathan around the head with the diary. But worse still when he presented them with his results: Maths 17%, Biological Science, 23%. And what else could William do but link these two abominations? ‘She helped you learn? Learn what? You’ve never had results like these before.’

  ‘The work is too hard for me, Dad.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Ask for help, from teachers. Not … Fechner.’

  Reminding himself to confront Bruno again.

  ‘Dad,’ Nathan had pleaded, ‘I’m sick of study.’ Although Nathan himself didn’t know whether this was true or not. Whether it was the boredom of facts. Or Lilli. Chanting Krishna in her summer frock in the middle of winter, tearing up books he despised without compromise.

  ‘From here on we work harder,’ William had said, throwing Nathan’s results into Bluma’s stove.

  ‘What about an apprenticeship?’ N
athan asked. ‘The government’s sent around to schools.’

  Adelaide apprenticeships. Boarding in town, coming home on weekends. The sort of disaster of a compromise which generally works between fathers and sons, William thought, allowing them both to save face, leaving the door open … Avoiding talk of dreams, of writing poetry or making pottery – piano-playing ambitions left to shrivel in the shadows where they belonged.

  As Nathan passed through Ovingham the city opened up in front of him: backyards full of soursobs and rusty bikes, Hills Hoists restrung with twine and teenagers cutting their toenails. Getting off at Islington works he found the appropriate building and had an interview with the works manager, who was turning an axle on a lathe the size of a Sherman tank. Nathan didn’t get as far as producing his reference. Handshakes were exchanged and details taken.

  That was it. He’d become a fridge mechanic.

  Endless centrefolds above fitters’ lathes promised ample consolation for the loss of an Eden of endless shiraz. Tanunda was the epicentre of the vintage festival. On the Saturday after Nathan’s interview, floats gathered in Goat Square for a procession of everything Prussian. Bluma, posed on a Dodge flat-top in a low tide of old lettuce leaves, was a Greek goddess in flannelette robes holding a vine-entwined staff. Children sat at her feet surrounded by semillon and chardonnay grapes as two third formers from St John’s climbed a giant Grecian urn like natives in search of coconuts.

  The same floats the locals had had for decades, courtesy of the Seppelt coopers and their apprentices. The Tanunda float (each of the Barossa towns was represented) was over-run with middle-aged Rhine maiden hausfraus courtesy of the Tanunda Hair Salon. Steps led up to an alfoil-covered throne where an unidentified Harvest Queen waved in the manner of the Princess Betty England. A giant papier-mache vine leaf in the shape of a sea shell extended its vascular network over the lot of them, protecting them from the rain which soaked their parade every year.

  Except this one. A perfect day. Girls with shades of Hitler-madchen sprinkling rose petals before the parade as oom-pah bands struggled to keep their footing on the back of trucks. Traditional costumes and headware had been resurrected from bags of naphthalene and strapped on uncomfortably in counterpoint to gym shoes and thermolactyls showing beneath collarless jackets in the Bavarian style.

  The major wineries had broken with tradition and organised a ‘Chemistry of Wine’ float, complete with scientists in lab coats testing wine in Pyrex beakers. This, a sign explained, was the future of their industry: the perfect pH and tannin, woodiness in predictable amounts, bags of tartaric acid hovering over the edge of giant stainless steel tanks which could each hold more than ten of William’s vintages. William himself shook his head and muttered to a stranger, ‘What’s that got to do with wine?’

  Nathan got in the spirit as a picker in traditional work clothes carrying a basket of shiraz grapes, distributing them to kiddies who lined the street in anticipation of something sweeter from the Apex float. Managing an almost sincere smile, he passed Joshua Heinz and his brood then Seymour Hicks and his daughter Ellen – Joseph, her husband, watching in the background from the steps of the Tanunda Hotel.

  And Lilli. Standing with her grandparents, her mum and dad busy hamming it up on the Yalumba ‘Four Crown Port’ float (‘The Port That Kept Mawson Warm in Antarctica’).

  ‘Haven’t seen you round,’ he said, placing his basket on the ground.

  ‘Hear you’re moving up in the world?’

  Instead of replying he just smiled.

  ‘You could’ve been a surgeon,’ she continued.

  ‘You could’ve been Prime Minister.’

  ‘Conquering the ching-chongs with my custard cake.’ She kissed Edna goodbye and started walking with him, the grapes forgotten in an ether of sexual chemistry bubbling from Penfold’s Pyrex.

  ‘I’ll be coming home on weekends,’ he said. ‘I get free travel.’

  ‘Goodness. How exciting for you.’

  He looked at a fine wrinkle, permanently set across her forehead, and knew she was jealous. ‘So we can catch up.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  And the creases around her cheeks, forming small canyons of their own. ‘Perhaps?’

  ‘You’ll have study, and church.’

  He smiled. ‘Feeble.’

  But she didn’t respond.

  ‘I should thank you,’ he continued.

  She frowned.

  ‘For Menge’s cave.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? I screwed up your exams.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well why bring it up?’

  ‘I could’ve just … gone on. And then where would I be?’

  She picked a bunch of grapes out of his basket. ‘Chin whiskers.’

  And although he smiled she just raised her eyebrows and, picking grapes, sucking their juice and spitting them on to the footpath, returned to Bruno and Edna. Nathan wanted to say something but didn’t, couldn’t, dismissed again by someone close to him. It could’ve been lust, or love, or he might’ve just been an amusement, a pastime, a situation which he’d completely misread. Perhaps he’d become a challenge, a canvas on which she could paint over the algebra scrawls of his father. But, he figured, he was always analysing things too much, and his conclusions were generally always wrong.

  Just because she was twenty-two and he was sixteen. He’d read about such relationships in Hollywood, men who mowed the lawns of bored, rich women. He didn’t have a problem with this but, as it turned out, she wasn’t as liberated as her manner or comments suggested, having him believe that she might dance naked in the mouth of Menge’s cave as she waited for some Hindu god to swoop down and fuck her.

  Nathan picked up his basket and walked on, smiling a barely credible smile as he got rid of his grapes as quickly as possible.

  He’d spent the last few days repairing things with his father, working silently beside him in the wash-house. Blending different amounts of shiraz and merlot and trying them, spitting them into the concrete wash-basin and rinsing until they’d come up with something William was almost happy with.

  Generally, at this point, William would seek out Bruno Hermann’s opinion, sharing a glass of his first blend over the back fence. This year Bruno was forgotten, waiting, watching on his back porch as William returned to the wash-house without so much as looking at him.

  Going inside, Bruno said to Edna, ‘William is moody again.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  But Bruno didn’t say anything, Lilli having already explained to both of them how Nathan had dragged her up to Menge’s Hill when he should have been studying.

  The following day was Pastor Henry’s turn to have his say about Erntedanke, the harvest thanksgiving rich with the imagery of the vine and the winepress. The ladies had spent the previous evening decorating Langmeil church with their homemade garlands. The winning entry from Farm Day was given pride of place on the altar beside Henry. It was a controlled explosion of Arthur’s gladiolus and lisianthus which Ian Doms’ youngest had dreamt up as a tribute to the Blessed Mary. Who soon took centre-stage in a hymn of thanksgiving which finished in an exaltation to the great vigneron, imploring him to keep them safe from the Eyeties with their sparkling reds and the industrial chemists with their tartaric acid.

  Thy word, O God, keep ever pure:

  Protect Thy congregation;

  Keep us untainted, and secure

  From this vile generation …

  Henry watched as Edna, bent over the organ, lost her spot in a coughing fit and Bruno sprung from his chair in anticipation of a very public Heimlich manoeuvre. Soon she recovered and continued, her rheumy fingers clicking like so many wishbones snapping cleanly in two. The front row grimaced as they listened, as they did every Sunday, suffering over the distorted blur of an improvised C sharp minor (she could only play on the black keys).

  The Nicene Creed was invoked and a sermon, in Henry’s most musical voice, led the congregation towa
rds the lake of fire in which those missing from the book of life, at the End of Days, would be cast. What would the lake look like, he asked. The settling pond at the cement works, or the fountain in front of Yaldara homestead? Most probably like a slurry of hot, fermenting hops, indigestion bubbling up from the Sons of Darkness as they spent their eternities in perpetual copulation.

  And then he began to improvise, smiling as he dared to descend from his pulpit to play the role of Christ, recently returned to earth in fulfilment of his promise. He had just appeared in Heuzenroeder’s homeopathic shop as the elder Mrs Heuzenroeder was closing up. This got a big laugh, and the elder Mrs Heuzenroeder herself blushed in shades of red which Max Factor hadn’t even dreamt of. Christ, unable to convince her of who he was, was sent packing down Murray Street, where he set up a soapbox in front of the Holden dealership.

  ‘“It’s me!”’ Henry cried, re-mounting his pulpit as grandmothers farted beside their respective Stations of the Cross.

  Jesus is crucified.

  Henry took the voice of a heckler. ‘“If it’s you, give us a sign!”’

  Jesus is taken down.

  As the Messiah, Henry explained, re-inflated a flat tyre on one of the dealership’s FXs.

  William, unsure if he should be alarmed at the levity, smiled a shallow smile he could explain away later if need be.

  Henry waited until the laughing subsided and whispered, ‘“The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”’

  And everybody heard him, replying in a hushed, communal whisper. ‘Amen.’

  As church was let out, Bruno stopped the Millers beneath the tallest of the candle pines at the top of the hill. Shaking Nathan’s hand he said, ‘We’re all happy for you. And you too, William.’

  Holding his neighbour’s arm and rubbing it.

  ‘Nathan’s decided,’ William said, curt. ‘There’s no good going on about it now.’

  ‘About what?’

  But William was already off down the avenue of pines, followed distantly by Bluma and Nathan.

  Chapter Six

  William popped his head into Arthur’s workshop. ‘Seymour’s waiting.’