Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  ‘I’ll be right there.’

  He waited outside with his hands in his pockets, watching a snail moving up the stem of a mostly dead larkspur. Inside, Arthur finished marking an arm of his cross with a hot poker: What shall I render to the Lord, For all his bounty to me? The smell of burning Tasmanian oak wafted out, through a plastic fly curtain, over to William as he picked up the snail and bowled it with his best Neil Harvey over-arm.

  ‘Arthur!’

  ‘Coming.’

  Seymour Hicks, sitting behind the wheel of his hearse, tried to sound his horn but remembered it didn’t work. Winding down the window he called, ‘William,’ as Mary rubbed away the condensation and said, ‘It’s like the good old days.’

  ‘When was that?’

  She kicked her husband’s leg. ‘The demister didn’t work back then either.’

  The hearse had been converted into a mini bus, of sorts, cushioned pews down both sides, feet resting on the metal receptacle which used to hold the coffins.

  Joseph Tabrar, sitting beside his wife and three children, looked at his blurred reflection in a silver crucifix screwed into the roof. Then he turned to Ellen and asked, ‘Have you looked?’

  Referring to the brochure he’d given her on the satellite city of Elizabeth, a township about to be constructed in the outer northern orbits of Adelaide; promising ‘all new homes and amenities, parks and gardens in a formal style … modern hospitals and well-equipped schools’. All for the children of the migrants who Premier Playford would tempt over from the land of hope and hailstone, subsidising their fares in a hazy dream of Chips Rafferty with sheep. In reality a housing estate, doing horizontally what England had done vertically. Backyards big enough for cabbages and lettuces but little else.

  ‘If we get in now … pay a deposit.’

  Ellen didn’t look at him, staring ahead. ‘David, did you bring your Brownie?’

  Their middle child grimaced. ‘It’s Chas’s too,’ implicating his youngest brother. ‘When do I get to use it?’

  ‘All the time.’

  Joseph looked into the clouded window. ‘Quiet!’

  ‘All those migrants,’ his wife replied, trying to draw him out on her terms.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I’ve always lived here.’

  Close to Mary, her mother with her Barossa roots and a taste for white pudding. Close to Seymour, who’d always believed if it wasn’t for him his daughter would have fallen into a great, dark chasm of Presbyterian shame and poverty. Ironing shirts in a tenement bed-sit for the dim-wit husband with his drinking problem (which would surely develop when they moved away) as their kids (with their filthy faces) crawled up the walls.

  These were Seymour’s thoughts, as he waited behind the wheel, looking back through the cracked rear-vision mirror, thinking, we all have a cross to bear. Because of the alternatives. Because of things we can’t change. Nailing notices on church doors: 21. Life without Christ is stew without meat. 22. Dr Mosse and his Indian Root Pills cannot cure their way to Heaven. 23. Heaven is no seaside resort reached by steam train.

  Ellen turned to Joseph. ‘I’ve read your brochure,’ she said.

  But now Joseph refused to answer.

  ‘This can’t go on forever,’ he whispered.

  Seymour thought he could make out Joseph’s words. Unsure, he decided to say nothing, although he had before, late one night a year ago. ‘If you’re unhappy, leave, but if you think my daughter will go with you …’

  Both Joseph and Seymour stared at Ellen.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, we’re perfectly happy,’ she replied, intent on damage control, taking Joseph by the arm and soothing his fiery temper.

  Arthur opened the back of the hearse and climbed in. ‘Sorry.’

  Followed by William and Bluma who, they claimed, had left Nathan inside with a book on the history of the Railways. The hearse set off, stopping next to pick up Julius Rechner, William telling the teacher how he shouldn’t feel bad about Nathan, having only done his job.

  ‘Nathan could repeat,’ Julius consoled. ‘He still has it in him.’

  ‘He could, but he won’t,’ Bluma interrupted, shaking her head.

  ‘I could talk to him.’

  William shook his hand in the air. ‘At that age, they can’t be told.’

  Detouring via Gruenberg they picked up Ron Rohwer and his young wife, then made for Lyndoch, only a few miles down the road, for the second outing of the Langmeil church’s social club.

  The first, they laughed and remembered as they drove, had been a trip to the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. Pastor Henry had shown them around the Micronesian and Aboriginal galleries, commenting how, although the Aborigines had been denied the good news of Christ, they’d nonetheless manufactured some very charming artefacts. Ian Doms, who couldn’t come this year, had actually picked up a boomerang and said, ‘They produced this, as Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.’

  This missed the point altogether, Henry explained. Without the light of Jesus there could be no Sistine Chapel. Therefore, the boomerang affirmed the message of Christ even more.

  But worse was to come. They were joined by a natural history guide who showed them around the stuffed animals, stopping in front of a wedge-tailed eagle and saying, ‘In evolutionary terms, the birds of prey predated most of our … garden varieties.’ Going on to relate this to Charles Darwin, the pigeon-fancier, who had compared the English carrier and short-faced tumbler, outlining differences and similarities in their beaks and skulls, explaining how their elongated eyelids and nostril orifices proved their brotherhood beyond a doubt.

  Like the Negro and the Asian. Eskimo and European.

  Moving on to Annie, Darwin’s daughter, whose death the guide described in the most Dickensian terms. ‘After she died, Darwin realised …’

  ‘What?’ William asked.

  ‘The purpose of all this.’

  Turning on his heels and presenting them with a whole gallery of dead things, caught in the act of hunting and eating, preening and sleeping.

  ‘The purpose being?’ William asked.

  ‘Nothing. Life was meaningless. God couldn’t expect to take the credit for all Creation and at the same time strike down innocent children. It didn’t add up.’

  Silence. William shook his head. ‘And all this came from Mars?’

  The guide smiled. ‘Perhaps.’

  William stepped forward but before he could say anything else, Bluma was dragging him off towards the cafeteria.

  No such dilemmas at Dinkum World, the social committee had decided. Here was a place, according to the brochures, where the best of Australia was celebrated. In the spirit of a Lawson story, read by a sheepless Rafferty around a roaring fire as cattle moaned in the distance – this would be the archetypal Aussie day. Visitors and migrants would go away understanding a little bit more about the wide, brown land.

  A stobie pole painted with acacia-entwined slouch hats was their first taste of Dinkum World. The hearse turned off and followed a paling fence covered with Aussie advertisements: homemakers with a Persil dazzle clutching their husbands’ new Pelaco shirts.

  Arriving at a carpark overgrown with asparagus fern, the group bundled out of the hearse and paid a sixteen-year-old the precise amount at group discount rate, pound notes tied up with a piece of Bluma’s recycled string. Pastor Henry was there waiting for them, smiling.

  First up, a man called Doctor Hamilton (this was never explained) showed the social committee how to attach corks to their hats. William improvised with one each side of his woollen cap. They were then led down a garden path, the joke having to be explained, and stopped before a replica outback dunny. When you opened the door and dropped a penny in a slot, the toilet seat lifted and a giant redback spider raised its head out of the pan. Bluma clung to Mary Hicks’ arm and laughed. ‘Who knows what’s living down ours?’

  ‘It may get a bit blue, ladies,’ Doctor Hamilton said. They then continued along a path t
o the next exhibit: a nightie on a pole. Doctor Hamilton urged William to turn a handle and as he did the pole lifted and then dropped. They looked at the Doctor. ‘Up and down like a bride’s nightie.’

  No response.

  Jesus Christ, religious nuts, Hamilton thought, having had groups like this from the valley before. ‘A real Aussie saying,’ Hamilton explained, but no one was buying a word.

  ‘Okay, this way to our wildlife exhibits,’ the Doctor said at last, motioning towards the path.

  As they continued Pastor Henry noticed a sandbox, the type used to stub out cigarettes. ‘That’s nothing,’ Hamilton explained, but Henry was already standing beside it. Inside the sandbox was a small jam jar full of what looked like dog’s hair; an old, winged nun’s habit was arranged around it. Henry’s expression turned from anticipation to confusion.

  ‘What is it?’ Bluma asked.

  ‘This way,’ Doctor Hamilton urged.

  As they shuffled along, mostly in silence, Seymour pulled up beside William and said, ‘I’ve checked all your dates.’

  ‘And?’

  Seymour smiled.

  ‘Seymour, to me there’s no doubt. I’ve had no theological training –

  ’ ‘How’s it possible then?’ Ron Rohwer interrupted from behind.

  ‘Faith,’ William replied, turning his head back. ‘Faith, the Bible, study, time … and a well worn Cruden’s Concordance.’

  ‘Setting dates is a folly,’ Ron said. ‘A sin. How does it go? “No man knoweth the hour or day, not the angels in Heaven … the Father only.” Is that right, Pastor Henry?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Still caught up in the old Glen Ewin jam jar.

  ‘“No man knoweth the hour …”’ Ron repeated.

  ‘Yes, Matthew … twenty-four.’

  ‘William seems to think he knows.’

  ‘Who’s to say? The Bible’s a very strange, a very imprecise book.’

  ‘But it’s the word of God.’

  ‘And others.’

  ‘“Take heed,”’ Ron continued, ‘“watch and pray, you won’t know when the time is …” or words to that effect.’

  ‘“It is not for you to know the times or seasons,”’ Henry said, ‘“which the Father have put in His power.”’ Going on to explain how they still knew when to pick grapes, when the leaves of the myrtle would turn, when the winter reached its equinox and the summer its most searing. ‘I mean, we’re not entirely stupid,’ he concluded. ‘Still, it’s a big ask, William.’

  Doctor Hamilton couldn’t believe his ears. From The Overlanders to the Amish. More Fritz than the Chapman’s factory, and a group discount too. Still, they’d paid. Goebbels was dead and part of being an Aussie was to take people as you found them.

  ‘So,’ Ron continued, ‘you, William Miller, above all other men, know the exact year, month and day?’

  ‘Kookaburras,’ Doctor Hamilton whispered, as he pointed.

  ‘According to the Jewish calendar,’ William replied, ‘it would be March twenty-one.’

  ‘Nineteen fifty-two?’

  ‘I believe.’

  ‘What do you make of that, Pastor Henry?’

  Henry stopped in his tracks, a confused Moses leading his tribe towards emus. The others stopped and looked at him. Even Doctor Hamilton stopped.

  ‘As dry as a nun’s nasty? Is that correct?’

  Doctor Hamilton smiled, but everyone else was shocked.

  Henry sighed. ‘Well, at least that’s one thing I know.’ And smiled, walking on, taking the lead from Doctor Hamilton.

  As they continued on through denuded scrub, overgrown with potato weed and horehound, Ron Rohwer took William aside and said, ‘Just because someone exploded a bomb, doesn’t mean the world’s going to end. Every time’s had its bomb.’

  William was silent.

  ‘There’ll be a sign.’

  ‘What sign?’ William barked.

  ‘Churches with Christ’s face in the plaster.’

  ‘Rubbish. Signs for idiots. Haven’t come to nothing … anything.’ Whereas William’s path had been logical, mathematical, as well thought-out and balanced as an algebraic equation. He continued on without looking at Ron. ‘We’re all entitled to our own views, Ron.’

  ‘Not to brainwash others, though.’

  ‘Brainwash!’

  Ron stopped but the others kept moving. ‘“No man knows,”’ he whispered to himself, seeking higher consolation than Pastor Henry, who was caught up in a vision of someone harvesting their pubic hairs.

  They were marched past an enclosure containing three lame wallabies that had been orphaned by a Holden. ‘My daughter nurses them,’ Hamilton said. ‘When she’s not busy in the ticket booth.’ The Doctor explained how a Chinese panda, sitting motionless in a grassy enclosure, would be dead had Dinkum World not purchased it from the Chinese government when some zoo or other was about to close.

  The pentothal narrowly avoided, thought William.

  But suffering a sadder, slower form of euthanasia, as lorikeets and galahs from an adjacent aviary mimicked the sounds of his apocalypse.

  The social committee settled in for their free sausage sizzle and the Doctor encouraged them to carve their names into a roughly hewn outdoor setting. ‘Carved by our neighbour,’ Hamilton said. ‘A Yid, but by far the nicest Red Sea pedestrian I’ve ever met.’

  Eventually it was time for a group photo. The Doctor stood beside William, smiled and said, ‘Meine freundes, ha?’

  William looked at his watch and sighed once again.

  William lay in long grass in the late afternoon, watching drops of water trail down split tomatoes he’d told Bluma she never should have planted. Dusted regularly, but dying anyway. Turning a winter yellow of everything gone weedy, setting seed in a garden no one would bother about until spring.

  He looked up, but then closed his eyes, his ears alert to distant trucks and sheep, a breeze through stray, wild oats. A Cessna over the High Eden Ridge transformed into the stukas of a nearly forgotten World War Two newsreel, screened for the town’s benefit during the war in the Tanunda Institute. Then, days later, there were the trucks full of new street signs: overnight Bethanien became Bethany, and the Kaiserstuhl, Mount Kitchener. Pastor Henry had been ordered to pray in English and the Holy Cross and Gnadenberg churches were told to paint over their portraits of Luther, depictions of Prussian villages and narratives with decorative script, and to remove five statues of Jeremiah, Moses, St Peter, St Paul and Jesus, which were handed over to the Anglicans.

  William was looking for a Wettebaum, a ‘weather tree’ that formed itself in the shape of a conifer in the high cloud formations which had made their way over from the west. The Wettebaum, it was said, would forecast the arrival of rain three days later. Another story said that if it rained on the twenty-seventh of June (three days time) then it would rain for the following seven weeks straight.

  William had made out a Model T Ford, the face of Billy Hughes and even an olive tree. Close but not close enough. Mostly the clouds refused to solidify into shapes-as-signs, giving no indication of things to come, such as the council mowing of verges which always preceded their rates notice.

  Bruno Hermann had always ridiculed William for his old-fashioned beliefs, but each time it had rained on the twenty-seventh it had just kept raining. Sometimes on and off, but without fail, for seven weeks, give or take a few days (And no, it’s not just the normal course of winter, Bruno). On June twenty-four last year, as he was lying in this exact same spot, Bruno had come over to the fence and said, ‘Look up there, William, it’s a pencil pine … or is it an Aleppo?’

  Laughing. But William’s eyes had stayed focused and he’d found one. Calling back to Bruno, busy on the throne, ‘Look, perfectly formed,’ not bending or warping as it made its way across the sky. ‘I have to see this,’ Bruno had said as he emerged, fighting with half a dozen buttons, to see William pointing at a giant pine tree stretched out across a blue canvas.

  ‘Doesn’t mean a
nything,’ Bruno had muttered, but three days later William saw Bruno at his window, peering out at a sky full of dark clouds. William, vindicated, was doing the same, explaining to Bluma how Bruno had lost touch with his past.

  But sometimes faith wasn’t enough. The clouds had passed on without shedding a drop and that evening Bruno was at William’s back door, explaining how the Siebenschlafer made about as much sense as life without electricity or gas. Still, he explained, we make worlds in our own heads and live in them, if that’s what you want.

  Bruno wasn’t troubled with technology. Crushers the size of B-17s, aerial spraying? No problem. ‘Luther himself was a reformer,’ he’d told William. Nailing notices to church doors. 21. My Kelvinator tractor is a rare and beautiful thing. 22. God would have us fill the bellies of starving kiddies, regardless of the means.

  And this is what William heard, laying in the grass in search of cumulus pine. Bruno on his Kelvinator tractor, emerging from his shed with Ian Doms’ boom spray in tow.

  He refused to sit up or open his eyes, or let Bruno spoil his day. He continued scanning the skies hopefully, picking up a viburnum-scented breeze from the Tanunda Road. And when Bruno engaged his P.T.O. and the air pump started charging the tanks, William lay back and thought of better ways of doing things: of neighbours (real neighbours) who used to help out with the hand-sowing, harvesting and stooking, and who would look after your children and share their extra lemons. Of preserving your own pears, avoiding tin cans leaching God-knows-what, and re-tiling your own roof.

  Bruno opened the arms of the boom and re-mounted his tractor; opening the nozzles he engaged high range and started making passes through a paddock of Salvation Jane which he’d let go for too long. William had complained but it was too late now, the weed having set and dropped its seed. Up and forth, William trying to remain focused on the sky. Until a cloud of poison drifted over and settled on his face.

  Spitting it out he sat up and wiped himself. He stood up and went over to the fence, waving at Bruno. Bruno left his tractor idling and came over to him. ‘William, what were you doing in the grass?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Spitting. ‘What are you using?’