Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  Nathan started toying with the crusts on his plate. ‘What can I say? Thanks …’

  Phil sat forward, smiling. ‘Herr Wilhelm won’t say anything if he doesn’t know. Tell him they’re waiting for his signature, draw it out, make it sound like you’re depending on him. Then pow, sign on the bottom line and stuff you Mr – ’

  ‘Phillip!’ Rose stood up, collected the cups and plates on the tray and said, ‘See, Nathan, for all his many, numerous faults, my husband does get things done.’

  Nathan breathed deeply and sighed. ‘And they’ll do this for me?’

  ‘Of course. We’re a very practical lot at the Railways, you should’ve learnt that by now. Always find a way.’

  ‘Thanks, Bob.’ And went on to explain, as Phil cracked up, how it wasn’t his way to hug another man.

  The next morning Bob and the boys started early. Pryor, the mutt, lived up to his reputation and rode the running board all the way up Unley Road as they headed for the hills. When they stopped at the lights the dog jumped off, ran around the other cars barking, and hopped back on just before the lights turned green. Phil and Nathan fed him Arnott’s biscuits as they drove. Sniffing the breeze, balancing and licking crumbs from his whiskers, Pryor was a miraculous sight, full of an endless energy drawn from spring sunshine, yapping enough to drown out car radios.

  As they moved into the foot-hills, Bob changed down into third and whispered, ‘C’mon, Betsy,’ as the engine struggled on three cylinders. Just before Mitcham the temperature gauge moved into the red and he pulled over. Popping the bonnet, he noticed that the radiator had started to steam. ‘Who’d pay three hundred pounds for this?’ he asked, and the boys had to agree, there were better ways to waste your money. In the end he decided they couldn’t risk taking it up into the hills. Luckily Torrens Park railway station was only a few blocks away, and after some discussion, they decided it’d be a waste to turn back now.

  As they headed up to the hills in an eight-wheel sit-up, Bob grew concerned about the dog. ‘Anyone could stop and steal him.’ He moved his rifle uncomfortably across his knee.

  ‘Who steals a dog?’ Phil asked, as they passed through tunnels and up inclines.

  Nathan surveyed sheer cliff faces which rose above them, dropping occasional chunks of granite and limestone into wire barriers. Caves had formed, each as impenetrable as the memory of Menge’s, leading him into a haze of all-things-Tanunda– Lilli, wood sorrel and an over-full septic cart moving down Murray Street.

  Early in the afternoon, just as Nathan was imagining the Millerites gathering around Arthur’s ark to pray for lost souls, Phil, Bob and Nathan left their gear beside a creek of rocks and soup cans in National Park, setting off on a hike which Bob had promised to use to showcase his knowledge of native flora.

  ‘This one here, a river red gum.’

  ‘Dad, we know.’

  ‘And this one, the golden wattle.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘But where have you seen it before?’

  ‘The national coat of arms.’

  ‘Very good.’

  Bob managed to find and name the same six plants he’d shown Phil on the same hike eight years earlier. ‘And here, xanthorrhoea, or black boy. Look at that seed pod, amazing.’ Especially to a man who spent his days covered with grease and smelling of turps, insulating cold rooms in the cathedral of darkness that was Islington. ‘Casuarina, known by what other name, Phil?’

  ‘Sheoak.’

  ‘And over there, look, callitris?’

  ‘Native pine?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  At three they returned to their campsite and started unpacking.

  Bob took his rifle and set off in search of rabbit, insisting he could cook the myxomatosis out of anything.

  When Phil was sure his father had gone, he unzipped Nathan’s bag and retrieved a copy of the Field Guide to the Agarics he’d hidden earlier.

  ‘Agarics?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Fungi,’ Phil smiled, taking his arm and leading him beside the creek.

  Mostly they just found common field mushrooms, their speckled white caps and brown gills bringing flavour to a thousand kitchens of boiled and burnt meats. Although the guide didn’t say as much, Phil had been told Cortinarius australiensis was the collectors’ favourite, laced with a compound resembling lysergic acid and unmistakable thanks to its bulbous base and rust-brown spores. ‘We touched on Mycology in first year,’ Phil said, as Nathan smiled. In the end they found a specimen which looked close to the one in the book, and since they’d ruled out the poisonous ones …

  Eventually they found a dozen, took them back to camp and started a fire. Phil crushed them up in a foldaway saucepan and boiled them in water as Nathan kept watch. Hearing rifle shots in the distance, they guessed it was safe.

  Phil went first, sniffing and then gulping the brew down in a single swallow. Nathan wasn’t so sure, sipping some and spitting it out in disgust. Throwing away the evidence, they settled in around the fire to see what happened.

  They closed their eyes and crossed their legs and Phil started reciting the Vajra Guru mantra from a card he kept in his wallet. Before long Nathan broke up laughing, rolling on the ground and intoning Hebrews 13 as a sort of counterpoint: ‘“Be not carried about with diverse and strange doctrines …”’ Phil picked up a log and threw it at him, ‘Pipe down, God boy, I want to see what happens.’ Apart from getting a cramp, the closest Phil came to an hallucination was the memory of Davy Clarke’s In Salzkammergut.

  Bob returned an hour later, minus a rabbit, but with a summons from a ranger for hunting in a National Park. They cooked toast and ate it plain. An hour after dark, as Bob was pointing out the major constellations, Phil complained of a stomach ache and started vomiting. A few minutes later it started to rain. Minus any shelter, they ran back to the station to find they’d missed the last train. ‘What we need now,’ Phil said, his arms on his knees and his head between his legs, ‘is a good dose of Revelations.’

  They all laughed, spending the night talking, analysing the Gospels and eventually falling asleep on the benches of Belair station as the rain eased.

  The next morning when they got back to the Whippet they found Pryor lying dead on the front seat, his tongue sticking out of his mouth. Bob was convinced he’d left the window down and when he returned the car, later that morning, he told the works manager some bastard must’ve come and put it up.

  Arthur had started off cautiously. On the first day he walked the length of Langmeil Road, turning back before the intersection with Seltzer Road, where the bitumen widened out into a carpark in front of a sprawling reserve of sugar gums the pioneers had forgotten to clear. On the second day he made it down Murray Street as far as Angas Street and on the third, to Burings Road, which was almost halfway to Nuriootpa. On the fourth day, nursing a sore shoulder and blistered feet, he made it as far as Nuriootpa High School, deciding the only thing limiting his progress was having to return home every night.

  So that night he packed a can of baked beans and a bottle of water in his swag and strapped it to the base of his cross. The idea was to start off with an overnighter, then two, three, four nights, a week, months, maybe years, traversing Chile or Greenland or the United States with his cross over his shoulder.

  It was a Thursday afternoon. He’d stopped just an hour before to grease the wheel on the base of his cross, but it squeaked, like the pedal on Edna’s old Singer. He adjusted the pillow on his shoulder and reholstered the cross, walking, tripping on fig roots and hidden drains.

  Jimmy Hoffmann, a sixty-two-year-old cousin of Pastor Henry who rode his bike between valley towns collecting bottles in a gunny sack, stopped on the opposite verge and called out to Arthur over the traffic: ‘Hey, what’s that for?’

  Arthur turned to him and smiled. ‘I carry it for the love of Jesus.’

  Hoffmann looked at him, trying to decide if he was genuine. ‘Where you going?’

  Arthur shrugged. Hoffmann shook
his head, re-mounted his bike and rode off towards the Coke bottle paradise of Tanunda.

  Arthur walked on, whispering to himself, ‘For the love of Jesus.’

  It had come to him after the split with William. The message was simple: God could be found in olive groves and marketplaces, on the Graetztown Corner, walking beside the stone walls of Henschke’s Hill of Grace. These were the places he’d find God, and these were the places he’d go, seeking out people and telling them the News. And in searching these people out, he’d experience his own revelations: baked beans more divine than Bluma’s rhubarb crumble, nights as still and peaceful as childhood sleepouts on the Pewsey Vale Peak. Along the way he could speak to people about his God, the god of grace and forgiveness who rode along beside Jimmy Hoffmann, protecting him from moving vans and strays.

  It wouldn’t be a mission as such. He’d be happy to leave it at a smile or a wave, sharing cheese sambies on the steps of the Seppelt mausoleum. No preaching or using the Scriptures to argue a point. That was the old way. He’d carry his Bible, but that was to pray for the ones who wanted it. ‘Give me a dose of the Gospels, Arthur,’ they’d ask, holding his hand, seeking consolation from things last heard at the Metho Sunday School. In this way God would travel the valley and beyond, doing what the disciples had done as they wore out endless pairs of sandals. Doing what William had failed to do.

  An old Ford pulled up on the verge, chugging uneasily in the afternoon sun. A hand motioned for Arthur to approach and he went around to the driver’s side. A small man in a suit and tie looked out and asked, ‘You’re Arthur Blessitt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Scholz, Doctor Scholz. My grand-dad had the hospital at Light Pass. Homeopathic. You use Altona drops?’

  ‘Sometimes. Used to be rheumy in the knees, but one day it just cleared up, all of a sudden.’

  ‘Thing is, I got the cancer, in me bowels. They put me in a nappy. I ain’t scared to tell you that, Arthur. I ain’t scared cos I got Jesus.’

  ‘Amen.’

  Jesus, sitting on the torn upholstery beside him, studying road maps and suggesting short cuts, watching his speed and ushering him towards the grave.

  ‘Pray for me, Arthur, pray for me.’

  Something Seymour or Joshua or Arthur himself had never asked William to do, although he did it anyway. Arthur put his hand on Scholz’s arm and prayed, and when he finished, Scholz put a five-pound note in Arthur’s top pocket and drove off without speaking.

  Arthur knew he wasn’t the first. Years ago he’d read about a fella who’d gone through seventeen pairs of shoes walking through Africa, spreading his message to the lost tribes. He’d been attacked by baboons in Kenya and a green mamba snake in Ghana, chased by elephants in Tanzania and gorged by a crocodile in Zimbabwe. He’d eaten squid in ink in Djibouti as soldiers with machine guns watched him suspiciously. He’d had his cross thrown under a truck and stolen in Capetown. The next morning he’d found the blackened wheel in a cold campfire. But he’d found a carpenter and had another one made, going on to feast on monkey legs in Chad and rat soup in Mozambique. He’d set up in the middle of shanty towns and spewed St Paul in technicolour verse over bemused black fellas with three words of English. Still, this evangelist had believed, watching the sun rise over Mount Kilimanjaro, he was doing the right thing, and would be rewarded.

  Misguided, Arthur thought, transmuting the example of Christ into arrogance, telling empty stomachs what they’d done to deserve hunger.

  That night he lit a fire in a clearing adjacent to a roadside rest stop. After he’d finished his beans he went for a walk and found a deserted graveyard, the headstones broken and overgrown by weeds. He tried to read the fragments of names and dates, indecipherable apart from Hier ruhen in Gott and Schlafen Sie Wohl. An impression of a vine-encrusted anchor was still intact, still attached to an ironstone cross as impermanent as his own. Returning to the camp, he cleaned his cross with a rag, so that the inscription he’d burnt into it –What shall I render to the Lord? – could be read from a slow-moving car.

  He settled into his swag until, just after dark, a moped-riding reporter from the Oracle pulled into the rest stop. He got off and came over to Arthur.

  ‘You’re the fella wrote that article?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Mr Miller’s mission?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I just wrote what I saw. Mind if I join you?’

  ‘No, go ahead, I only have beans.’

  ‘I’ve eaten.’ The reporter sat down, scanning the camp site for copy – narcotics, religious pamphlets, anything. ‘I came looking for you,’ he said. ‘Pastor Henry said you’ve fallen out with Miller?’

  ‘If that’s why you’re here – ’ ‘No, honest, I’ve said enough about him.’

  Just then Seymour Hicks’ hearse slowed down and pulled over on the opposite side of the road. Arthur stood up and waved as Chas and David wound down the back window. ‘Hello, Arthur.’

  ‘Pull up the window,’ he heard Seymour scream, tooting his horn in the absence of a better insult, and speeding off. Arthur sat down, somewhat taken back, staring into the fire. The reporter sat forward. ‘Yer not breakin’ bread with him either, eh?’

  ‘That’s personal,’ Arthur replied.

  ‘Sorry. When’s their big day?’

  ‘March.’

  ‘You changed your mind?’

  ‘I said I don’t want to – ’ ‘Okay. Well, let’s talk about this,’ said the reporter, pointing to the cross and extracting a notepad. ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Nothing. Jesus said, “Take your cross and screw on a wheel.”

  So I did.’

  ‘Jesus actually said this to you?’

  Arthur spoke slowly, trying to remain calm. ‘No, listen, I know what you’re after. Why don’t you just say it as it is?’

  ‘Which is?’

  Arthur moved about uncomfortably on the ground. ‘Yesterday this big fella stops his car and comes over to me. He takes the cross and lays it down and lifts me up in the air by the scruff. I say, “Hey, you look like a big, strong fella, can you help me carry my cross?” And five minutes later he’s carrying it towards Springton. We stop at a deli for a coffee and someone has to drive him back to his car. That’s what I’m doing. I’m putting up a big billboard, Come Try Jesus! Some people stop and say I must have a lot of guts, but it’s not me, it’s Jesus.’

  ‘But that’s what Mr Miller said.’

  ‘Listen, you don’t have to stop if you don’t want to.’

  They moved onto a discussion of where he’d go next and Arthur explained he was getting tired and might head home for a spell.

  ‘And after that?’ the reporter asked.

  ‘Getting my steam up. Maybe head off towards Adelaide.’

  ‘What would they think of you there?’

  ‘Jesus goes everywhere.’

  On his way home the next day, Arthur stopped in at the Oracle’s offices and had his picture taken in front of the press on which the Millerites had printed their leaflets.

  (An irony which escaped him. When William read the article the next day he cut it out and stuck it in his scrapbook, finishing it off with a border of red exclamation marks and the comment, ‘Take up your cross?’)

  Two days later Arthur set off for Adelaide. By the time he returned, six weeks later, he was a minor celebrity, having featured in both daily papers several times, each time with a bigger photo and cornier caption: ‘I walk for the love of Jesus’, ‘Jesus walks beside me on Main North Road’. There was none of the angle they’d tried for in Tanunda, none of the village idiot or religious freak. One mother, having brought her child to be kissed, claimed he was a modern miracle. But when an article appeared claiming he was gaining cult status, he’d decided it was time to head home.

  During all this time, William Miller bought the Adelaide papers daily, searching them for any reference to Arthur and reading the articles aloud to Bluma. ‘“One guy shot at me from a pickup tru
ck. Apparently he missed.” “Apparently” – what does that mean, is he trying to be funny?’ Snipping and gluing away, trying to make sense of how such an idiot could be so loved.

  Nathan Miller read the stories to Bob and Rose, explaining how Arthur used to push him on his swing. One day Nathan set off with Phil to find his old babysitter on Churchill Road. The Advertiser had started publishing a ‘Where’s Arthur today?’ timeline, hour by hour, but Arthur had caught on and decided to change his route. The boys waited with a dozen others for about an hour but Arthur was nowhere to be seen.

  When Arthur arrived home at last, the Langmeil Elders – along with the mayor, the local, state and federal members, the CWA president and Rotary representatives – started visiting him with presents of yeast and woodworking tools, asking him where he was off to next and if they could walk with him for a way (along with a photographer or two). Pastor Henry claimed it would be good for the church, imagining photos of Arthur and the Elders between the Langmeil pines, proclaiming their faith and way of life and the fact that God walked with them. A writer from a women’s magazine contacted Arthur asking about perseverance and inner strength but again he just said, ‘No, not me. Jesus did this.’ (She had no idea what he meant, dropping the story in favour of an ‘at home’ with Rock Hudson.)

  In time it would all die down and he could be off again. This time he decided he’d go somewhere quieter, inland, or the southeast. Somewhere where he could find people who hadn’t heard about him, joining him to pray in front of post offices and public toilets.

  After Arthur had been home a week he went to sit in the sun on his back porch. His flowers were overgrown and needed harvesting, but all in good time. He looked around and saw William Miller staring at him from across the fence. William bowed his head and walked inside. Arthur could see where the Millerites had worn out the grass worshipping in front of his other cross.

  PART

  Three

  Chapter Fifteen