Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  ‘Glyphosate.’

  From a brand new drum, purchased with his sheep dip and a bag of linseed meal for his broilers; bagged and delivered to the back of his ute by the new boy at Bennett and Fisher’s. ‘Say hi to Lilli for me, Mr Hermann.’

  ‘How do you know Lilli?’

  ‘We did maths together.’

  ‘Oh.’

  As Bruno’s tractor chugged he leaned on a fence post and spoke quietly. ‘How was I to know, William?’

  ‘Look at the breeze, Bruno. People have washing out. That went straight onto our vegetables.’

  ‘Can’t hurt ’em.’

  ‘The point is – ’ ‘Alright, I’m sorry. Just the same, don’t see snakes lying in long grass.’ Bruno was tempted to tell William about Bluma, secretly dusting his cabbages and tomatoes when he was off at kegel or choir. Instead he took a deep breath and tried to keep the peace.

  ‘Think you’ll get your rain this year?’

  ‘Have to wash these clothes.’

  As if glyphosate was some mortal sin in liquid form.

  ‘William –’

  ‘People farmed a long time without – ’

  ‘You got shit on the liver.’

  William stepped forward, indignant. ‘I haven’t got – ’ ‘It’s this business with Lilli, isn’t it? She tells me it was your Nathan took her up there.’

  ‘I’m talking about poison.’

  ‘No you’re not. This is because things haven’t ended up like you wanted.’

  ‘Pesticides stay in the body.’

  ‘Lilli’s got spirit, but she isn’t what you think.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘A tramp.’

  ‘It’s Nathan’s choice.’

  Bruno’s Kelvinator chugged uneasily and stopped. He looked around and back at William. ‘I suppose that’s a sign.’

  ‘You’re superstitious.’

  Bruno smiled, folded his arms and thought about Bluma with her hand-crocheted covers that she pulled over mirrors during thunder storms to stop the collection and deflection of God’s anger down hallways and through bedrooms, up into Nathan’s sleeping loft and down into their cold cellar. ‘Anyway, I gotta finish this,’ he said, turning and walking off. ‘All the best to Nathan for his new job.’

  William stormed into the wash-house, slamming the door and sitting fully clothed. He knew where the problem was. It was Bruno’s son-in-law, Peter Fechner, forever busy in Adelaide, who had neglected his duties as a father, allowing Lilli to drift through life without so much as a thought for the essentials: God, family, school. Allowing her to turn from a valuable member of their community into someone who didn’t care. A child of her age, more than willing to infect others with the plague of apathy. Infecting Nathan whenever he was around her. Until he succumbed, Julius writing it up in his reddest ink: Nathan lost his focus. Just as much on God as Biology, or so William believed. And so he wanted to tell Bruno.

  In the end it was best to show some discretion, lest things degenerate into a soap opera of carefully scripted replies, which ultimately led nowhere.

  He pulled off his clothes and soaked them in the trough, taking washing powder from the cupboard and pouring it in by the handful. Then he filled a bucket with cold water and tipped it over his head, again and again, until he was shivering and his penis had shrunk to the width of a carpenter’s pencil. Finally he set to his clothes, scrubbing, rinsing and draining. Again and again, until his hands were red and numb.

  And then he opened the door and called out at the top of his voice, ‘Bluma!’

  ‘Yes?’ Emerging with a scone cutter.

  ‘Bring me some clothes.’

  That night William left early for kegel, minus the Wettebaum which he’d probably missed as it dispersed across a pasture of blue sky thanks to Bruno’s stubbornness.

  Bluma helped Nathan pack his duffle bag: work boots and T-shirts, hankies and freshly ironed underwear; a Bible, which he promised he’d return to from time to time; and a jar of pickled dill cucumbers for his host.

  ‘Help with the washing up, leave the toilet lid down and don’t talk politics.’

  ‘Or religion?’

  ‘Unless it’s the Bible. They may be Methody.’

  Bluma was trying to finish some white-work, improvising with a needle too big by half. This time, Schlafen Sie Wohl, for Nathan’s hosts to hang above their bed. Nathan was reading what remained of William’s newspaper when there was a knock at the door, followed by a head, and Lilli bearing a gift.

  ‘Mrs Miller, how are you?’ Kissing his mother on both cheeks like some impudent Frenchy.

  ‘Fine. And your mum?’

  But Lilli just smiled and handed Nathan the gift. ‘For those long nights when you haven’t got me around.’

  Nathan looked at Bluma. Unable to explain what this girl was doing in their home, he shrugged and unwrapped the present. The Golden Age of Steam. ‘Thank you. Just in case I haven’t had enough during the day.’

  ‘Just in case,’ she smiled.

  Nathan was confused, but he already knew that with Lilli what you saw wasn’t necessarily what you got. Lilli was coming to resemble some barely believable creation from a radio soap. While Lilli sat and talked with Bluma, promising his mother free cake if she came in when it was quiet, Nathan tried to read her motives. Then he wondered if he wasn’t becoming like his father, analysing agendas where there were none, sealing his observations away inside a glass brick wall where they could be seen but not changed.

  Walking her home later that night he said, ‘I can’t win with you.’

  ‘Do you know what that book cost me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing … it was my Dad’s.’

  They stopped inside the ruins of an old cottage and sat on rubble. ‘Will you miss me?’ he asked.

  She smiled and almost laughed. ‘“Oh, Rex, my heart beats like the wings of a – ”’

  ‘Alright!’ Throwing the handle of an old saucepan at her.

  ‘It’s not a gulag,’ she said.

  He looked at the moon on her face, settling on her high cheek bones. ‘I’m sort of looking forward to it,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been saying. Do you know how backward this place is? Quaint.’

  And all at once Nathan thought of his father again, William’s anachronisms growing cheesier by the minute in contemplation, like so many remaindered postcards of places which no longer existed except in people’s memory. Places in which the desperate clung for dear life, catching buses where they no longer ran and singing (mostly incorrect) lyrics from songs no one remembered or cared about. William’s world had ossified. Nathan knew that he had to move on, because the alternative was death by hand harvesting. Memories had to be forged, made unique, otherwise they were just somebody else’s.

  ‘I’m not going to be here forever,’ she said, as if trying to convince herself more than anyone. ‘Oh, I forgot.’ She pulled out a newspaper clipping and smiled. ‘I found this … I thought if you had any spare time.’ She used her best recitation voice, leaving behind the boy on the burning deck in favour of the Adelaide Advertiser classifieds. ‘“Greek goddess. Traditional recipes involved. Discount for the liberators of Crete.”’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’ She rolled her eyes and he slowly got it. ‘Oh …’

  ‘There’s a number for you.’

  ‘No, no, I have The Golden Age of Steam.’

  ‘Those long, lonely nights.’

  ‘I’m a school kid.’

  ‘Not anymore.’

  Where William had harvested news of the 38th Parallel, Lilli had cut out the Adult Services (William had found them too, deciding they should be in his scrapbook of signs, but deferring in the interests of decency). She kept reading, two columns of everything hot and spicy in bluestone Adelaide, cooking away under the nose of Playford and the moral majority, decent folks in frocks with cardies sipping bronchial cure and listening to Blue Hills as Mistress Josephi
ne, severe and sensational, took endless calls on a PMG bakelite phone, alternating between home and a cottage in Wright Street which charged by the hour.

  ‘This one’s for you. “Male to male. Ryan. Tall, dark and gorgeous.”’ Nathan laughed and sat back, trying not to think about it. Eventually he crawled over the rubble and sat next to her. ‘I’ll take it anyway.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know what to do.’

  ‘“Sheena. Well dressed …”’ he read, but stopped, watching as Lilli stretched back, like William in search of lost weather trees, emotionally neutral, curious.

  Bloody hell, he thought, watching the rise and fall of her chest.

  ‘Are you looking at me?’ she asked, sounding detached.

  ‘Of course. It’s you or a pile of rocks.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He moved on top of her. No words necessary. If religion was instruction then nature was instinct. Michelle seeks pillion passenger. Hold tight, keep quiet. He held her arms down and said, ‘Who’s feeble now?’ feeling, for what seemed like the first time ever, completely in charge of what happened next. No morals to be drawn from the Scriptures. None of William’s homilies.

  He unbuttoned her blouse, quickly, confidently, and there they were, like a pair of Bluma’s Berlei’s hung out to dry, bulging like over ripe tomatoes about to split down the side. Verbal instructions followed, putting a momentary damper on things, but he quickly moved onto the fullness of her body as they rolled together over rubble and rusted tools, a broken mixing bowl and a baby’s rattle.

  As he sat on top of her, shirtless in the full moonlight, he wondered if it’d finish as quickly as it started, Lilli taking off into the night like Grable painted onto the side of a B-17.

  And then suddenly, at a crucial moment, William appeared out of the darkness. ‘Seven angels with seven vials full of plague,’ he was saying to Arthur, who was skipping to keep up with him. ‘Let’s see: TB, polio, smallpox, syphilis, cholera …’

  Nathan lay on top of Lilli as the men walked past the glassless window, so close he could hear his father breathing and Arthur coughing. He covered Lilli’s mouth when she giggled, but then he started laughing too, rolling off her, ending up in the old fireplace, breaking up as William passed into the distance.

  ‘I’ve had it,’ he smiled.

  She crawled over to him. ‘Of course. Why did you come to Menge’s cave?’

  Unable to find the right words, he continued.

  As far as trains were concerned, he guessed he’d either end up loving or hating them.

  It all started on the trip down from Tanunda when the conductor, having found out where Nathan was going, started in on the history of the Brill railcar in which they were travelling.

  ‘Built by the Railways in 1928, Islington workshops, by fellas just like you.’ Taking Nathan up front to meet the driver, who explained the crunch gear-box and clutch, how the Brill would come to be seen as the pioneer of diesel railcars, moving on to a history of broad versus narrow gauge, which itself was a discussion of colonial politics, Federation and opportunities missed.

  Nathan was saved by Islington station – a platform hemmed in by depots and workshops, parallel and criss-crossing lines filled with steam and diesel and rolling stock: eight-wheeled side loaders and four-wheeled sit-ups, the cafeteria car and the Governor’s Vice Regal. Men in overalls sat in the sun against workshop walls eating stale sandwiches of corned beef and pickled onions beside white and red geraniums (to Islington what carob trees were to Tanunda).

  Nathan was overcome by the smell of the place: coal dust drifting and settling like mist in the Flaxman Valley, into every pore in every man’s skin, hair, car windscreens – floating through windows onto official SA Railways correspondence, over the fence and across Churchill Road, settling on the washing of the double-fronted red brick homes. As he crossed the tracks the smell of oil came up in vapours, emitted from gravel, quarried in Kavel’s day, that had never seen weeds or grass or anything remotely green. A big, black loco moved off from taking water and blasted him; Nathan jumped and kept walking, feeling like a mite lost in the train-set his father would never build him.

  Peering inside giant, cavernous workshops he saw men at work on axles and wheels and pistons and rods, welding, hammering, illuminated by arc lights and skylights and cathedral windows covering whole walls, the message of Christ replaced by the homilies of Commissioner William Webb: The only basis of economy in railway operation is the reduction of train miles by the use of large capacity cars and the largest possible locomotives.

  Nathan, now kitted out in green overalls and workboots, was introduced to Bob Drummond, a lightly bearded man of about fifty with rampant nostril hair. ‘Bob looks after the refrigeration apprentices,’ a supervisor explained – teaching them, watching their work, keeping them in line and, in Nathan’s case, having them board with him and his family during the week.

  ‘I have a son a little older than you,’ Bob said, ‘he’ll keep you busy.’

  Nathan smiled. ‘Busy?’

  ‘Nothing your parents wouldn’t approve of.’

  And Nathan thought, I wouldn’t be so sure.

  He was led through the yards, through a door into the western end of a shed given over to refrigeration and hydraulics. ‘S’pose it’s a bit of a culture shock,’ Bob half asked, stopping to look at him more closely. ‘You from the Barossa?’

  ‘Tanunda.’

  ‘Nice spot.’

  He means for day trips, Nathan thought, for a quick Sunday motor, wine-tasting and authentic yeasts.

  ‘What’s that little bakery?’ Bob asked.

  ‘Apex.’

  ‘Yeah. Bloody beautiful. I could get you to bring some down on Mondays.’

  ‘Sure.’ Thinking how it’d be a good reason to visit Lilli, and how impressed she’d be with him in his overalls and workboots.

  Bob took him into a side office and sat him on a sofa of ruptured springs. Seating himself behind a desk he went through the indenture papers Nathan would have to sign, and get co-signed by his parents. ‘Miller … you’re not one of those humourless Lutherans then?’

  Nathan paused and sighed. ‘Actually, we were Muller before the war.’

  Bob kept reading. ‘I generalise. Still, you seem okay. You’ll need a sense of humour to work in this place.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘These fellas are salt of the earth, no bullshit. Meat and three veg, football and milk on your back doorstep. Don’t bring your ballet shoes, and leave your Bible at home. What you give is what you get and if you’re a smart arse … you don’t seem like a smart arse … you wanna learn?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Make some money?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be bad.’

  Bob paused and looked at him. ‘Your lot have always stuck to themselves,’ he said. ‘I always thought that was strange.’

  ‘They were persecuted in Germany.’

  ‘Wouldn’t a happened here.’

  Nathan looked back at Bob, who was busy printing words in a slow, simple script. He looked at his mentor’s sideburns and fat, pasty cheeks and imagined him sitting in his living-room, surrounded by Cornish seascapes and a portrait of the King. He imagined Bob carving corned beef (encased in fat) and dead-heading his agapanthus on a quiet Sunday afternoon. He wondered how comfortable he’d be losing his ironstone heritage.

  ‘Tanunda is inbred,’ he smiled. ‘You find yourself fancying your cousins.’

  Bob grinned. ‘You’re a bloody lunatic, Muller.’

  ‘Sieg heil.’

  ‘Just don’t forget my bloody streusel.’

  Nathan was set straight to work on an eight-wheeled Butcher van, a refrigerated Commonwealth Rail carriage which formed part of the Tea and Sugar train. This supply train, he was told, made weekly runs across the Nullarbor desert, stopping at sidings to sell groceries from one carriage and meat from another. The Butcher van featured a cool-room stocked with whole animals on hook, a pair of resident b
utchers cutting by request. Over time water had ruined the wooden panelling which lined the cool-room, holding in thick insulation which did its best against Nullarbor summers as compressors worked tirelessly to keep everything cold.

  With gloves and mask he worked beside another apprentice, pulling nails and stripping back the wood. At one point the older red-head warned, ‘Watch out, they’ll be coming for you.’

  ‘Who will?’

  But the red-head just shrugged and wouldn’t elaborate.

  After they had stacked the wood and removed the insulation, Nathan was left to sweep out the carriage. Finishing up, he heard voices outside and then saw a group of six young men, all in green overalls, standing in the doorway.

  It only took them a minute to strip Nathan, putting his boots back on and locking him in. The compressor clicked on and a cold vapour as thick as mist rose from the floorboards. For an hour he stood and sat, jogging on the spot, swinging from the stainless steel beams which held the carcases on hook, unsure whether he was pissed off or amused – either way, determined to laugh about it when they opened the door.

  Which wasn’t the ending he’d expected. Being carried across the workshop by the same six in overalls. Lowered into a 44-gallon drum full of cold, murky water and honoured with a crown of geraniums and a toilet-brush sceptre. Bob stood in the background smiling. Nathan could read his lips as he whispered, ‘No bullshit.’

  ‘Here stands the King of Kings,’ the red-head mocked, and they all laughed uncontrollably.

  Nathan shook his head. ‘When do I get out of here?’

  ‘When you’ve been judged,’ the red-head laughed. And with that they led in half a dozen office girls, who took seats and settled in with smiles on their faces, obviously used to this game.

  Nathan lowered himself into the drum until his shoulders were just above the water.

  ‘We can wait all day,’ one of the girls called, and with that the whistle blew for the fellas’ smoko.

  Nathan waited another ten minutes but by then his toes and fingers were numb. ‘Is this for real?’ he asked, and they all laughed, choking on sandwiches and fighting back tears.

  Attack was the best form of defence. Nathan submerged his head and used his weight to tip the drum over. As the group leapt about to save their shoes he climbed from the drum and ran towards the office, making no attempt to hide himself, shouting Navajo war cries and leaping through the air like a gazelle.