Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  ‘I, William Miller, again to be known as Wilhelm Muller, have read and studied the Scriptures for some years now. The figuring of dates is not as important as some suggest. Nevertheless, if you take the trouble to ask, I’ll explain …’

  On and on, explaining how he’d decided to leave the congregation – to hushed sighs of relief – and continue his worship from home. How anybody who’d like to join him was welcome. How, on the twenty-first of March next year, Jesus would return to earth via the Muller home, and various other places, gathering disciples to sit beside him in his thousand-year reign on earth. How he, Wilhelm Muller, wasn’t here to judge anyone, except that the signs were there, and Jesus would ask about such matters as faith, unlikely to let things ride with the equivalent of a library fine. How the ‘abominations of desolation’ could be known by all those who wanted to understand and be ready for His coming. ‘I am fully convinced that on March twenty-one next, according to the Jewish mode of computation of time, Christ will come and bring all his saints with him, and then that He shall reward every man as his work shall be.’

  Silence. Henry looked at him. ‘You finished, William?’

  ‘Wilhelm.’

  Lilli’s cousin emerged from the hall, screaming and crying, pointing back and saying, ‘Jesus’ wife made babies for money.’

  She found her mother and collapsed into her lap as everyone looked back at William. He left his speech on Henry’s pulpit, walking out of the church, down the avenue of pencil pines, never to return. Bluma followed close behind, tripping over legs and apologising as a hundred or so voices passed sentence. The children drifted back into the church and Henry finished his benediction. Lilli and Nathan exited via the rear of the hall, damage done, Lilli with the copy of Don Bosco she was going to finish illustrating for him.

  Later that morning, Henry stacked the chairs in the hall as St Sebastian, pockmarked with red and yellow plasticine, smiled down on him. The scribbled notes scattered on the floor spoke of a day when even the sun was unsure of its trajectory, burning through high cloud and laying itself across the cold ground of the Eden Valley. Seymour Hicks appeared behind him and said, ‘Pastor Henry …’

  Henry used his foot to crush a bin full of butcher’s paper. ‘Seymour …’ Pausing. ‘You looked very uncomfortable.’

  ‘We didn’t know what he was up to.’ Seeing how they were really just props for a highly polished performance.

  ‘Don’t worry, Seymour, no one’s judging you,’ Henry whispered.

  ‘We didn’t think he’d …’ Wondering if Henry thought he was hedging bets. ‘I’m on the door next Sunday.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘Henry …’

  ‘What’s done is done. To me, Seymour, faith’s not a matter of dates.’

  ‘He’s explained it …’

  ‘I know …’ Thinking of St Rita, the patroness of Impossible Causes, who longed to suffer like Jesus, pleading until she was struck by a thorn from a crucifix, the wound turning septic and killing her. Like William, wishing too hard for the wrong thing.

  Nathan and Lilli took the scenic route past Traut Heim, a villa-turned-guest house that boasted the valley’s first ‘Scandinavian-style spa bath’. They crossed a rope bridge over the North Para River and passed the Byhursts’ property with its two dozen rusted car bodies awaiting their own apocalyptic salvation. They followed the path along the creek, through Arthur’s bottom paddock and into the Miller vines. Eventually arriving at the wash-house, they grabbed two bottles of shiraz from a crate ready for Seymour to deliver, and retraced their steps.

  ‘I know a good spot,’ Lilli said, fumbling in her pocket for Pastor Henry’s corkscrew. Passing down Elizabeth Street and Langmeil Road, she hid the bottles up her blouse whenever they passed someone on streets which couldn’t handle cars going both ways, crumbling cottage and workshop walls forcing pedestrians to go single file on footpaths collapsing into cobble-stone gutters. The fault of people who drove cars instead of carts, blocking laneways and filling cottage gardens with exhaust.

  They crossed into the recreation park and sat in the shade of already ancient Moreton Bay figs showering over-ripe fruit. The stench of decay was heavy in the air as sulphur-crested cockatoos went crazy on the soft flesh of a sleepy Tanunda Sunday. Families set out picnics on Onkaparinga rugs as one of Nathan’s old teachers whacked the hell out of golf balls he had no intention of retrieving.

  Nathan sat on a swing and worked his way up to a semi-circular arc. As he did he saw nothing of William’s vision of roof tops and tree branches flying through space in the company of redeeming angels. He couldn’t recognise children’s voices as screams, or air past his ears as a vortex of sulphuric acid, pulling him down a plughole into a hell as hot as the Simpson Desert. To Nathan, the air smelt only of rotting fruit, dried-up water holes and chimneys smoking down laneways of cracked bitumen.

  They sat high in the grandstand, overlooking football games avoided and distant tennis games of a lifetime ago. ‘Although it just seems like a few weeks,’ he said, drinking and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Not bad … a little young.’

  ‘As if you’d know.’

  He imagined a football game on the oval below. Phil Drummond in one of Bob’s wheelchairs, sunk into the soggy turf as St Sebastian on a butcher’s-paper donkey chased him across the oval, throwing lumps of yellow plasticine and singing the Veni creator. Phil replied with choruses from The Whitehorse Inn and his only line, ‘I do.’ Spliced with quotes from Schopenhauer’s Indestructibility of Being and definitions of Class A and B drugs.

  St John Bosco, with his twelve-foot elephantine cock, looked back at Nathan from the front row of the grandstand and said, ‘God spoke to your father on the Hill of Grace …’ St John becoming Lilli, gurgling wine and gulping it down. ‘No shit, I heard it from Sarah.’

  ‘Sarah who?’

  ‘Sarah Heinz.’

  Nathan looked confused. ‘So?’

  ‘I’m not making it up. God appears to your dad and says, “Jesus is coming back, but I’m only telling you. Now, go to the Bible and work out when.”’

  Nathan lay back and let the world start to spin. ‘It’s made up, they wanna make him look stupid.’

  ‘No, Sarah’s not smart enough for that. The thing I find funny … if I was God, which I’m not – ’ ‘No.’

  ‘Why would you go to all the trouble of blowing your cover, and then leave out the details?’ She climbed into the time-keeper’s box. ‘Nathan Miller, I have chosen you, to spread the message, from Yunta to Kyancutta …’ Standing on the time-keeper’s desk. ‘Praise me!’

  Nathan placed his feet flat on the ground but it was still unstable. Nodding his head he said, ‘He might’ve thought he heard God …’ And after some more deliberation, ‘No, you’re right, he’s not all there.’

  She returned and sat next to him. ‘Just what I heard.’

  ‘It’d explain his obsession.’

  ‘But indicates a sort of …’

  ‘Lilli … believing is like, it’s a state of … it’s like being pissed.

  What seems strange to one person …’ He shrugged. ‘Sometimes, when everyone’s singing, it all seems to make sense.’

  ‘Feeble, Miller.’

  ‘Perhaps … but nice, in its own way.’

  ‘Like The Magic Faraway Tree.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It’s a story.’

  Looking at her. ‘Good sense only gets you so far.’

  ‘Reckon?’ She shrugged. ‘Small reward for big lie. The voice of God?’

  ‘I know, feeble.’

  The bottles sat empty before them and Nathan put his head between his legs. He felt Lilli slap him on the back and saw her walking up and down the rows on the backs of seats. St John Bosco, flooded by a spectrum of diffused and pure colours, looked around at him and said, ‘Your dad’s gonna kill you.’

  Far below, Phil Drummond was wrestling in the mud with the martyr of yellow plasticine.
Lilli slipped, grazing herself, revealing her hairy legs to him again. A caretaker appeared at the bottom of the stairs and said, ‘Come on you two, we’re locking the gates.’

  Lilli took him home past the bakery, writing an IOU for PK spearmints which would fail to hide the smell of wine from William.

  Sitting in his loft that night, copying and re-copying Hebrews 13, Nathan couldn’t reconcile the person he’d so recently been, with what he’d become. Failing exams had been a disaster and a God-send, the same with Lilli and Phil and Bob and Rose and even the corned beef sandwiches in the Webb cafeteria. Still, there was no turning back. The heavens would have to explode and scatter before they ran out of momentum. Even then gravity would shrink them back into a pin-prick the size of a sub-atomic particle. And then what? A heaven of hymn singers? Nathan fixing fridges in the broad-gauge city of Babylon?

  PART

  Two

  Chapter Nine

  Nathan walked to Tanunda Station in the dark. As the grey of morning broke in a grainy light, thoughts of Sunday in the grandstand, under Moreton Bay figs, slowly evaporated like tepid puddles in a Murray Street gutter. (In the grandstand a cat sniffed the empty bottles and passed on, leaving them for a third-grader from the Lutheran school who’d find them, packing them in his satchel beside The Magic Pudding and the weekend’s aborted long division.)

  Passing the Evans’ Wursthaus, Nathan stopped to stare in the window and wonder if he’d ever return. He had visions of William, walking the streets of Kilburn, looking for number seventeen Church Avenue, calling, ‘Nathan, I demand you return home at once,’ to endless Hebrews copied mindlessly in his loft, his resentment growing by the minute. As it had last night – peering down at William gluing his articles, Bluma snipping and smoothing a review of Quo Vadis. He’d been tempted to call down to his father, ‘You really believe you heard the voice of God?’ But chose to let his resentments simmer, cooking through slowly like a stew.

  William again, with a photo of Lake Eyre in flood, still wondering if it wasn’t God’s doing – stands of eucalypts marooned, slowly drowning in a giant, brown puddle which showed no signs of receding. And a cocky in a boat, floating among it all, apparently looking for something. William wondered aloud if it mightn’t be the puffed up corpse of the Fechner girl, or Rohwer. Bluma scolded him, saying who gave him the moral high ground, just because of the Langmeil business. Jesus didn’t judge, she said, he offered salvation. That’s where the church had gone wrong, teaching kids about the fear of Hell and an unwashed face.

  Nathan passed along Ferdinand Street, leaving peppercorn and carob trees behind, watching for the steam and smoke in the distance which would indicate a change of scene, of sight and smell, and of a rigid Lutheran mindset which guided his every thought and decision.

  The train moved slowly toward town. Over creeks so small they didn’t warrant names, past Rowland Flat with its patchwork pasture and vines, Lyndoch, Sandy Creek and beyond. Passing through paddocks scarred by Highways Department graders which would become the new suburb of Elizabeth. The signs already up: The Satellite City of the Future. Rockets penetrating the rings of Saturn as astronauts contemplated Victa mowers. The slab of a hospital and civic centre poured, stobie poles raised in anticipation of bridal creeper and geraniums. Nissen huts salvaged from Woodside army barracks, for the first of the ten-pound Pommies, due any time. Newly seeded parks watered, but dying anyway, littered with monkey bars freshly welded and set in concrete. Excavations for a swimming pool which would chlorinate the eyes and infect the ears of a thousand sunburnt children.

  Passing into the outer suburbs he retrieved his Secrets of St John Bosco and perused the amended illustrations, meaning to show them to Phil. He suddenly thought, Shit, Bob’s cake. He was racked with guilt for the rest of the journey, trying to think how he’d explain his thoughtlessness to the man who’d let him stay on, who’d shared his shed and jarmies and candied almonds.

  Arriving at Islington he made for the Webb cafeteria but the best he could find was a finger bun. Presenting it to Bob before clocking on, he said, ‘To be a honest … I’ve been a bit of a dick-head.’ Going on to explain his disaster of a Sunday, inebriation (a slip-up, he promised, restricted to home), Lilli, Hebrews and a father straight out of the SS. But Bob had already absolved him, throwing him the overalls he’d left behind (which Rose had washed) and saying, ‘I’ll expect twice as much next week.’

  Regardless, Nathan felt bad for the whole day, wondering what Bob was really thinking (although in truth it didn’t cross his mind again).

  William started the day picking mushrooms from the grass flats sloping onto the Blickinstal hillside. Waders wrapped around his shins kept him dry as he popped mushrooms into a cotton bag embroidered with Bluma’s white-work: Gemutlichkeit – although there wasn’t much of that this morning. Just the feeling of another day closer to the End, Nathan off on his own orbit, people everywhere letting him down.

  The North Para River meandered slowly along water courses carved from soil and limestone; granite ridges, protruding like moss-encrusted flying saucers from the hillside, reminded him that a lot of time had passed without an apocalypse. Billions of years, he’d read somewhere, an article suggesting that all of human history would fit into the last ten seconds of the universe compressed into a calendar year. Which just went to show how much scientists really understood, creating theories with more holes than Bluma’s potato strainer. He was confident he was right. The End was as real as the oats and Salvation Jane stretching up the hillside, the smell of must, the blinding dazzle of sun off the river. He hadn’t even bothered saving the article, refusing to believe that anyone could take it seriously. He walked on, picking and deep-breathing as he approached the Basedow Road weighbridge.

  He returned home for a breakfast of fried sausages and a prayer. Soon Seymour arrived and they started loading crates into the back of his hearse. William explained how ‘all that business yesterday’ hadn’t come out of the blue. After his meeting with the Elders at Henry’s house he had got up the next morning and walked down to Tabor church. He’d waited a full hour before he was told Pastor Ewell had needed to pop out.

  ‘When should I return?’

  ‘This afternoon, after lunch.’

  He’d waited another hour then before they let him in. Sitting down, he had said, ‘I wish to change churches.’

  Pastor Ewell ran his hand through his hair. ‘William, have you thought this through?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You are still welcome at Langmeil.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘William, churches are families …’

  William picked up another crate and looked at Seymour.

  ‘“Families,” and he said, “No one is ever asked to leave a family.” Ha!’

  Seymour picked one of William’s cucumbers and bit into it.

  ‘But they’re made to feel unwelcome, eh?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And you told him that?’

  ‘I did. He said, “If you’re unhappy there you’ll be unhappy here.”’ William sat next to Seymour on the back of the hearse.

  ‘I didn’t want to hear any more, so I left. Without so much as a thank you. It was obvious others had already been in his ear.’

  Seymour kept crunching. ‘You’re right to have done what you did. He should be reported to the church bosses.’

  ‘They’re all the same.’ Going on to paraphrase the letter he’d returned home and written.

  Pastor Ewell,

  I was spoken to by God. Whether you believe me or not doesn’t matter. I KNOW. He said He would send His son to me and tell me about it. I believe the government of God will return to earth. Maybe not just here. Maybe in Brazil some miner or shop-keeper knows, or an eskimo, having heard the voice like me. By treating me so and listening to wrong voices I dont know how He will like you. Wearing the cloth is not enough. Many will be cast down. Shot like dogs. Wilhelm Muller.

  He told Seymour h
ow at St John’s and St Paul’s the next day he got as far as explaining his calculations, but how they’d said the same thing, return to your church, your family – and how at the end of the day they’d left him with no choice but to sit down and write his speech, his resignation, from the Langmeil family. He felt like Nathan, sent to the loft to copy Hebrews chapter thirteen, over and over, so that he could stay in their family on their terms. ‘Which I wasn’t willing to do,’ he said to Seymour.

  ‘They’ll all be cast down, Rohwer, Fritschle …’

  Although Gunther’s hell would have a climate control. William looked at Seymour. ‘I appreciate your support.’

  ‘William, it was the same in His time. And look what’s happened. I think, though, the misguided will be forgiven.

  Otherwise it’d just be you and me …’

  Convinced of the maths, at last.

  William smiled. ‘Perhaps …’

  Standing in his workshop later that night, Arthur showed William how he’d salvaged a wheel from an old wheel-barrow and attached it to the base of his cross. Making it a portable cross, more suitable for carrying across the shoulder, especially with the aid of an old cushion. Harnessing up, he went once around his bottom paddock for William’s benefit, walking, breaking into a trot, a budget Jesus on his way to a Kaiserstuhl crucifixion. William wasn’t sure what Jesus would make of it, but after Arthur explained it was to know His suffering, William himself was persuaded to drape a hundred pounds of Tasmanian oak across his own shoulder and walk. Eventually becoming so caught up – ‘And all this with the pain of thorns and open wounds’ – he convinced Arthur to let him start off towards kegel.

  By the time they passed Langmeil he gave the cross back, refreshed, walking tall in the Messiah’s footsteps. ‘This is a fine idea, Arthur, it will help us teach people about Christ.’

  ‘For teaching? That wasn’t quite what I intended.’

  But William wasn’t listening.