Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  In the reserve off Church Avenue, Kilburn, people sat around on parched, dying grass singing hymns with all the lustiness of the Tanunda Lutherans. They were gathered in what had been shade, although the sun had gone, leaving its heat behind. They were singing O Holy Night, Bob Drummond leading them as a sort of spastic conductor. Nathan was matching Rose’s lusty alto in the way he used to complement his mother’s soprano. Things out of kilter. Finding their own equilibrium beside a hedge of hydrangea bushes which desperately needed dead-heading.

  Back in the Millers’ cottage, still ten degrees cooler than the outside world, Bluma descended into her cold cellar to fetch meat for tomorrow. Just enough for two.

  No cut small enough. Standing beside the pork, holding a knife, she felt unable to go back up to Wilhelm.

  Meanwhile, Arthur sat on the front pew of Langmeil church holding a long, hollow pipe. Small candles on the Christmas tree would occasionally catch and he’d raise his pipe and blow out the flame. The candles’ heat rose towards the ceiling, turning ornamental wheels of angels circling central stars, a project the kiddies had done after the disaster of Nathan’s Sunday School.

  Night was invoked with an evening hymn, made lusty by the smell of honey cakes and sausage from the hall. Arthur closed the service, fittingly for many in light of what had happened in the last few months. He told the story of how a tyre company had offered to sponsor him, painting their name on his cross, photographing him holding it as it had a wheel alignment. Pastor Henry knew how to leave his crowd on a high, sacrificing a final benediction in favour of an encore from Arthur.

  Bluma came up from the cellar, placed the meat in a pan and covered it. William looked at her and whispered, ‘I know it’s hard to understand, but these are little things.’

  She wiped her hands and said, ‘They’re not …’ Returning to a vacuum of memories which had overtaken her, trying to find the words, and strength, to explain how she felt. How if they lost Nathan, they’d lost everything. How she didn’t care about the End anymore. How even six months ago she could never have imagined it would be like this – Nathan a part of another family, a happier one. She sat down, but none of these words came out. She looked at William and sighed. After a long pause she said to him, ‘I need to talk to our son.’

  William didn’t argue. She stood up and walked out of the house, crossing into Arthur’s yard and remembering he was still in church.

  William sat silently, still. There was no noise. There were no smells apart from the lingering odour of smoke in their curtains and bed clothes.

  Bluma re-appeared in the doorway. She stood staring at him and finally sat down, saying, ‘I’ll try in the morning … will you talk to him?’

  ‘On Arthur’s phone?’

  ‘We’ll find another.’

  She saw a piece of paper in the middle of the table. She picked it up and slowly read. It was a receipt for underlay and lino. William said, ‘That’s your present. I was going to show you in the morning.’

  It had been a secret visit to Wohler’s, William served by the younger Wohler, the one who’d found Nathan.

  William handed him the measurements and he did a quote. ‘That’s fine,’ William said, producing his grandfather’s purse, counting the notes and coins.

  ‘You want to pay now?’

  ‘Why not? It’s my wife’s asthma.’

  Wohler wrote a receipt.

  ‘Does that include installation?’ William asked.

  ‘Of course … how’s that boy of yours going?’

  ‘He’s in Adelaide.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  William didn’t answer, standing up, folding the receipt and walking from the store. And with that, Wohler knew he’d done the right thing by helping Nathan out.

  Back in her cottage, Bluma re-read the receipt but didn’t feel as happy as she knew she should have, as she might have a few months ago. She went around to her husband and kissed him on the top of his head. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You need to go select a pattern. Then they’ll make a time.’

  ‘Of course. This is a lot of money.’

  ‘You only have one pair of lungs.’

  She returned to her seat and made every effort to smile. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ William was silent. She fetched the kettle and went out back to the water tank. Standing, waiting, as it slowly trickled, she wondered how long she could be happy about linoleum.

  The next morning she went into Arthur’s and talked to Nathan for an hour and a half as Arthur topped up her coffee, trying, in his own way, to show her that things hadn’t changed so much, that all of William’s confusion would sort itself out in the same way that his had. And then Nathan would come home, and they could return to church.

  In the way Nathan talked, and what he talked about, she sensed she hadn’t lost him. William was barely mentioned and when he was it was in the same vein as an Abbott and Costello film they could both have a laugh about. Rose came on to wish Bluma season’s greetings and assure her, not in so many words, that she and Bob knew about the ups and downs of family life and that whatever and however long it took, they were willing to help. ‘And anyway,’ she concluded, ‘it keeps Phil out of our hair. We’ve never had it so good.’

  At the end there were promises of more calls. Nathan said that after March, ‘Dad should come good.’ Either way, he was happy, healthy, working and earning a decent wage. The rest would work itself out.

  Within a week she’d had two more calls and her lino laid. Some consolation for her worst Christmas ever.

  Arthur had pinned a map to his kitchen wall. His various journeys were marked in red texta, most noticeably a line which followed the road through Rowland Flat and Lyndoch, Gawler and Elizabeth, down the entire length of Main North Road towards the city. An arrow pointed towards another map, of the city itself, his route pockmarked with little numbers in circles which showed where he’d slept. Corresponding to the numbers were photos he’d taken with his box brownie: roadside rest stops, parklands, the banks of the Torrens on one of Joe Aronson’s quiet nights. Each showing Arthur with his cross and sleeping bag, warming beans on a fire or posing with a local, such as the policeman he’d talked out of evicting him from the David Jones carpark. There was always someone willing to take the photo, to stop and talk and share hot, strong coffee.

  But Adelaide was ancient history and he knew he couldn’t rest on his laurels for long. It was time for another journey. He traced the road north with his finger: Greenock, Kapunda, Riverton, Auburn and Clare. Or whichever detours took his fancy; the destination wasn’t so important.

  On a Tuesday night, just before the new year, he decided it was time. Packing his few things in a swag, he rolled it tightly and strapped it on his cross. Singing leftover Christmas carols he oiled his wheel, attached a reflector for night walking and gaffer-taped a cushion to the cross’s left arm. The following morning he pulled on his long, white walking socks, gym boots, skin-tight footy shorts and polo shirt. Pulling on a terry-towelling hat and coating every inch of exposed skin with zinc cream, he shouldered his cross and set off down Langmeil Road.

  Passing the Apex bakery he found Bruno cracking peanuts on a bench, throwing them into the air and catching them in his mouth. Resting his cross and settling down, Arthur asked, ‘Edna inside?’

  ‘She is. Where you off to now?’

  ‘Clare.’

  ‘They say it’ll be hot before the end of the week.’

  Arthur shrugged. ‘Packed me Zam-Buk.’ Bruno offered him a peanut. Soon it was the best of five, then ten, Arthur dropping nuts but picking them up and eating them anyway. Bruno managed a perfect score until Arthur said, ‘Hey, what if your life depended on catching the next nut?’

  Bruno looked at him scornfully then tried again. For the first time in three years he missed, his tongue attempting a late save. ‘Bloody hell, Arthur.’

  Arthur was doubled over with laughter when one of the Angaston Teppers came out of the bakery and said, ‘Mr
Blessitt, we read about you.’

  Arthur smiled and Bruno continued throwing nuts in the air.

  Mrs Tepper pulled her string bag closed and continued. ‘They say you were offered a radio show.’

  Arthur smiled. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say.’

  For the second time in so many years, Bruno nearly choked on a nut. Mrs Tepper leaned forward and kissed Arthur on the cheek and said, ‘This’ll be good for the valley,’ and then began to stroke the cross herself. ‘It looks bigger in the photos. Is it heavy?’

  ‘Tasmanian oak, but the wheel takes most of the weight. Unless, of course, it’s a bad road.’

  But Mrs Tepper was lost in the inscription, afraid to ask for an explanation lest he give one. ‘Yes, very nice, we have a dresser like this.’ Arthur signed her Apex bag and she passed on towards the Black and White.

  Bruno said, ‘They have no idea. Most of them think you’re a bit loopy.’

  Arthur shrugged. ‘Perhaps I am.’

  ‘One minute they see you with William … then …’ He threw a peanut at the cross and it hit Arthur’s swag. ‘Still, I think you got out just in time.’

  Unsure, Arthur looked at him. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, how’s it gonna look for the kiddies, Joshua’s lot, and Ellen’s and … what’s his name?’

  ‘Joseph.’

  ‘How’s it gonna look after … the big fizz?’

  There was silence for a minute or so, broken by a muffler blowing smoke on Murray Street. Bruno offered him another peanut but this time Arthur refused. ‘What if he’s right?’

  Bruno laughed, putting down his peanuts. ‘Those that stay around Goebbels too long will regret it. Them kiddies will be the ones that suffer. I’m not telling you anything new, am I, Arthur?’

  Arthur sighed and crushed peanut husks under foot.

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘He’ll turn out to be one of the worst things that’s happened to Tanunda.’

  ‘More than Tanunda.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  At length Arthur said, ‘What’s happened with Nathan, that’s what’s got me.’

  ‘There you go. I used to watch you lot, over there on a Saturday, and I’d think, how can they allow themselves to be led? Intelligent people, like Seymour. He’s got a diploma in something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Electronics … or was it floristry?’

  Which meant that Arthur knew what Bruno had been thinking about him, and maybe still did. ‘I was never comfortable,’ he continued, ‘but it’s always been my weakness, following. That’s why I’m gonna keep to myself now.’

  Bruno nodded. ‘I used to watch you over there, hammering away, building this and that. And then when William spoke, everyone was hushed, and I’d think, Spare me.’

  In his defence Arthur said, ‘It was a hard business for me to break with him. Our families have been close for years. His dad and mine.’ Still, time has a way of fixing these things up, he thought. Looking at Bruno he wasn’t so sure others would understand; he might have got out just in time, but apparently he was still tarnished. No amount of lugging around a lump of Tas oak could change that. According to Bruno it might even make it worse.

  ‘People do understand,’ Arthur said, wiping dust from his cross. ‘They tell me, this is what the preachers should be doing.’

  Bruno turned his head and smiled slyly. ‘What people say and what they think …’

  Arthur stood up. He wasn’t going to be defeated again, Bruno’s lack of faith substituting for William’s excess. ‘You still on to water my lisianthus?’ he asked.

  Bruno started tossing nuts again. ‘I’ll water your lissies.’

  ‘Say g’day to Edna for us.’

  ‘Where’d you say you were going?’

  ‘Clare.’

  Bruno smiled and nodded his head. ‘They’ll find you dead beside the road.’

  Arthur walked off towards Murray Street, smiling, singing, ‘“We wish you a Merry Christmas, We wish you a Merry Christmas …”’ Gunther Fritschle, driving his near-new Vanguard ute, crunched gears, sounded his horn and waved. Ron Rohwer, sitting beside Gunther, looked up from tuning the radio and said, ‘That man’s a marvel.’

  Their cabin was filled with the static of the Talmadge Sisters attempting Lerner and Loewe. ‘He’ll end up with the bucket back,’ Gunther replied, watching Arthur stumble in the rear-vision mirror. The sisters started an upbeat number as the Langmeil Elders turned down Hobbs Street towards Joshua Heinz’s house. Pulling up in front of number seventeen, Gunther waited for K,K,K, Katie, Beautiful Katie to finish before he switched off the ignition.

  Joshua’s second youngest ran out and opened the gate for them. ‘Are you here to see Dad?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, is he in?’

  ‘He’s practising.’

  Joshua was halfway through Franck’s Panis Angelicus when Ron, mounting the front steps, matched him with a harmony of a third. Joshua was oblivious, climbing to the crescendo, ‘“Hear us, hear us, hear us when we cry to thee!”’ Sarah, his eldest daughter and accompanist, struggled to find his variable tempos, tapping out, as she always did, the beat with her foot, calling, ‘One two three and …’ but eventually giving up. Like Ron, unable to match Joshua’s top C with his creaky baritone.

  When Gunther eventually knocked he heard Joshua say, ‘Bloody hell,’ stamping down the hallway and peering out into the light. ‘Gunther, Ron, come in.’

  Joshua showed them into his study, smelling of port and Butter Menthols, clearing insurance quotations from a sofa and assuring them the chocolate stains were old. A newspaper was spread across his desk, an article on Freddie Bartholomew’s lost millions sitting half read under the children’s crayon renderings of the Adelaide Baths. ‘I can’t get Franck out of my head,’ he said to Ron. ‘I need Harry here, and the other voices, otherwise I get lost. Do you find that?’

  Ron smiled. ‘To be honest, I don’t practise.’

  ‘Neither should I.’

  Sarah and a few of the children returned with lemonade. ‘The little ones made this,’ she said, ‘but I can vouch for it.’

  The boy who had met them at the gate toppled a glass but Joshua only laughed, passing Sarah the newspaper to blot it. He lit his pipe. It went out straight away and he put it back on his desk.

  ‘You’re friends with Bruno Hermann’s grand-daughter?’

  Gunther asked Sarah, although he knew quite well.

  ‘Yes.’

  But no mention of Gnadenberg, or Henschke’s with its endless stone walls, or how she’d got hold of William’s secret and given it to Lilli, Nathan and beyond. ‘Mr Miller’s neighbour, isn’t he?’

  Gunther asked, probing.

  Sarah frowned. ‘Who?’

  ‘Bruno Hermann.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joshua was curious. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Gunther drank some lemonade and said, ‘No reason.’ But then looked back at the young girl. ‘William Miller has some very … peculiar ideas.’

  She shrugged. ‘Are you asking or telling?’

  For Gunther it was too much like disrespect, just what he’d expect from a Heinz. Sensing this, Ron Rohwer took over. ‘How do you feel about all this business, Joshua? Are you looking forward to – ’ Joshua tapped his pipe in a bakelite ashtray. ‘Thank you, children.’

  After they’d gone, Gunther explained how they’d just been to see Seymour Hicks. How the conversation had started off amicably until they’d mentioned what they’d come for. How Seymour had refused to talk about William or their prayer group. How he was unwilling or unable to discuss what they believed. How they’d said that if an idea couldn’t be talked about, then it couldn’t be taken seriously. And finally, when they asked him how he’d feel after March, how he’d stood up and shown them the door. ‘It was very hard to understand,’ Ron explained. ‘We just went as peacemakers. Next thing he’s slamming the door behind us without so much as …’

  Joshua lo
oked at them. ‘He knew you wouldn’t see our side.’

  ‘We were willing to talk.’

  ‘Pastor Henry asked you to do this?’

  Gunther shook his head. ‘No, just the opposite, he wants to let it all blow over. Only, we don’t think it’ll be that easy for you and Seymour … and your families.’

  ‘Look at Arthur Blessitt,’ Ron continued. ‘People have already forgotten that he was … involved.’

  Joshua straightened up a pile of paperwork. ‘You’ve come to talk, or give me an ultimatum?’

  ‘Joshua,’ Gunther protested, ‘we all know Tanunda, and the valley, and how people think. William will never live this down. He’s wrong, and deep down he knows it. He needs others to … flatter him.’

  ‘Gunther, please,’ Joshua replied, shaking his head.

  ‘I didn’t mean you.’

  ‘I’m with William because I believe what the Bible says.’

  ‘But it doesn’t say that.’

  ‘Have you ever listened to his explanation?’

  ‘Of course, it’s nothing new, people have been playing around with dates for centuries. A hundred and twenty years ago there was this fella in America, said the same as William, managed to persuade hundreds. Most of them sold their farms and came to live with him. No one doubted what he said because he was convincing.’

  Joshua sat stony-faced, refusing to do what they’d accused Seymour of doing. Ron Rohwer took out his Bible and turned to Matthew 24, repeating and repeating how the hour and day no man knoweth. ‘Look, here, read it. It’s what the Bible really says.’

  ‘But it says other things.’

  ‘Indirectly. But here it’s clear.’ Turning to Acts he read: ‘“It is not for you to know the times or the seasons …”’

  Through all of this Joshua sat motionless, focusing on a toy stethoscope his youngest had left in his bookcase.

  Outside, the Heinz children tuned Ron’s car radio, keeping watch for Moses and Aaron and sneaking a few chocolates from Gunther’s Old Gold assortment.

  ‘It’s a matter of faith,’ Joshua said at last.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Ron replied.