Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  ‘It is.’

  ‘We have faith. We believe the Word. But it doesn’t mention March twenty-first.’

  Joshua started to feel like he was following a script. ‘What about the signs?’

  ‘Joshua.’

  ‘The A-bomb?’ He knew he was on shaky ground, he only hoped they didn’t know about William’s scrapbook. ‘And what about the Reds, taking over Asia, blowing up temples?’

  Gunther sat forward. ‘And Mussolini, and Hitler and his gas chambers. Didn’t mean the end of the world.’

  Joshua stopped, his head full of the images that had got him started. Piles of glasses and shoes, gold fillings and bodies they hadn’t managed to burn in time. And in the realisation that life goes on, he wondered whether he had been right. ‘What do people say about me?’

  Ron sat forward, sensing they were making some progress.

  ‘They say you were misled.’

  Joshua took a long, deep breath and then exhaled through his nose. He could smell sausage cooking in the kitchen and hear the voice of his wife Catherine laughing with Sarah. He could see the colour and movement of kingfishers outside of his window.

  The children struck gold: Gunther’s half-eaten Violet Crumble in the glove box and Rudy Valle on the radio.

  Joshua was running through the vines again, slipping in the mud, lying in filth, looking up into the sky through rain and cursing God. For not making things clear. For promising and then taking away.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Another hot day. Mary Hicks sat in the darkness of her bedroom, her feet in a bucket of water, a vinegar rag across her forehead and cucumber peel on the back of her neck. As she cooled herself with a bamboo fan she longed for distantly remembered gully winds, southerlies come to save them from over the Kaiserstuhl. Shadows and blurred shapes filled her bedroom, light cut into slices, laying itself across near new Berber courtesy of blinds as sharp as the Apex’s bread slicer.

  In the kitchen a puddle of water sat in front of the Hicks’ new all-electric fridge, its condenser broken, wet towels draped across its shiny, new enamel in an attempt to keep their food cold. If only Nathan was still around. That’s what the valley needed, she thought, people with skills, skills for the modern age, more electricians and fridge mechanics and less barrel makers and bakers.

  Joseph walked in the front door, sweat spreading osmotically from the armpits of his PMG shirt over pockets and through collars. ‘Hello.’

  Mary sat up, pulling her frock over her shoulders, wondering if she should close her bedroom door. ‘That you, Joe?’

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘They’ve gone out.’

  Joseph stepped in the puddle on the kitchen floor and placed his lunch box on the table. ‘I was going to take the kids to the movies.’

  Mary stopped to think. ‘Maybe they forgot.’

  ‘Where did Ellen take them?’

  Mary knew how he’d react, she’d seen him growing moodier with the passage of every hot day, saying things he’d formerly left unsaid, like, ‘There’s no future in this town, if you had any sense you’d get out too, Mary,’ although what his plans were she wasn’t sure.

  ‘She went with Seymour.’

  ‘Where?’

  A dozen places rushed through her head: the Black and White, the supermarket, Linke’s, a walk … but on a hundred degree day? No point. Everyone knew everything in Tanunda, handbills or no handbills. She only risked getting him even more off-side. ‘I think they just went to see William.’

  No reply. She heard his bedroom door slam and a few minutes later the front door. Waiting until the house was clear and looking in his room, she found his work clothes thrown into a pile in the corner, a bottle of California poppy left open and the smell of Rexona lingering. And in a piece of predictably bad timing, the voices of the children and Ellen and Seymour coming up the street.

  Joseph walked down Murray Street towards the Institute. Sitting on a bench beside Wohler’s he listened to the rantings of the God-man, Tanunda’s occasional speaker on matters theological. Like William, he was a member of no church, but unlike William, he didn’t claim to have any bigger or better ideas. He stood before a placard which read, About 1930 I had a gathering of children at the Nuri high school. Children made decisions for the Lord Jesus Christ.I am wondering whether anyone remembers this occasion? But if they did, they weren’t saying.

  God-man was a rarity, appearing two or three times a year, in pouring rain or fierce dust storms, year after year, wondering why no one knew about the children after so many years of asking. ‘I just spoke to them and said that if they agreed to believe in the Lord Jesus, to hold up their hands, and many of them did.’ Joseph listened to the tone in his voice: like Arthur’s, full of longing to know more about Christ. ‘I pray for the children who held up their hands, and that they’ll keep believing.’

  At seven o’clock he passed into the Institute in a better frame of mind. After drinking from the water cooler and wetting down his face and hair, he bought a ticket and went into the hall. Fabric had been taped over the windows and tarpaulins rolled out over the skylights. Despite this it was nearly as bright as outside. Flies buzzed in a low orbit through an ether of rising damp, naphthalene and poppy oil. Families lingered in aisles to catch up as children ran up into a balcony of stored filing cabinets. Joseph sat down in the back on a pew salvaged from Tabor, after they’d gone the way of chrome and vinyl. In his hands he held five paper bags he’d prepared that morning, each with a banana and sherbets, a couple of coconut ice and a Brockhoff biscuit. As the newsreel started to flicker and people scurried to their seats, he opened the first bag and started peeling what would become his tea.

  Francis the talking mule, with its stupid voice-over and tormented sidekick, had got them started. But Joe could remember laughing anyway, sitting in the very same possie with the very same brown bags. Chas laughing on Vicky’s shoulder, the half fake laugh he remembered all of his kids having. All of them eating their food within the first five minutes and asking for Coke.

  This time it was Francis Goes to the Races, an even cornier journey into the world of talking animals in which Francis fed his master Best Bets, straight from the horse’s mouth. Ten minutes in he was already squirming, having foreseen the ending by an hour or so, consoling himself with coconut ice which rained down like rampant dandruff. As the film continued, he couldn’t find anything funny. Without the children there was nothing. Just coconut forming a snowfield on his shirt as life passed him by – Donald O’Connor as the payer of bills, the bringer of discipline and the sorter of mail.

  Gags and showtunes were no substitute for family. Things had changed a lot in the last twelve months. The sequel could never match the original, Mickey Rooney would never be as good as O’Connor. This time last summer he’d hardly heard of William Miller, Ellen was still his wife and his children his children. Now they always seemed to be elsewhere, in spirit as much as body.

  Fans clicked away high on the ceiling. The ticket and candy bar girls sat along the back wall sipping lemonade and barley water, wiping themselves with flannels they kept cold in ice-water. Joseph saw the door opening and watched as one of the girls went out, returning with Ellen and the children, Ellen standing in the aisle, searching for him in light that was still too bright by half. Must have picked out my bald spot, he thought, as she ushered the children past knees and handbags, settling them in beside him and sitting at the opposite end. He sent the four bags, minus the coconut ice, back towards her, putting his arm around Chas and concentrating on the donkey’s lines.

  During intermission the children helped some of the men open high windows with a long, wooden pole. The first smell and light breezes of a southerly change blew in the front doors and fire exits they’d left open. Everyone could sense its approach. In the hall the mood changed from El Alamein to VE Day. Families gathered in clusters and laughter echoed between the Bessa brick walls. Flies retreated to distant barbecues and as the temperature st
arted to drop, top buttons of frocks were done up in a frenzy of shame.

  Joseph stood in the foyer biting the edges off a chocolate ice-cream, listening to Ellen explain how they’d only dropped in to pick up some wine. ‘You said we weren’t going till seven,’ she said, putting part of the blame back onto him. What would O’Connor say? What could he say? Next it would be, Stop feeling sorry for yourself, making mountains out of molehills. Instead he tried a different approach. ‘I spoke to Jim Fairlie today.’

  ‘Fairlie?’

  ‘He’s acting manager.’

  The shutters were pulled down on the candy bar and the girl pushed the buzzer. Empty paper cups blew in the front door from Murray Street, scraping across the floorboards and coming to rest against the door of the ladies powder room. ‘He said I can transfer,’ Joseph continued. ‘To the GPO.’

  She looked confused. ‘So …?’

  ‘So, we can set up in town. More opportunities in the city.’

  ‘But where do we live?’

  ‘I’ll find a place.’

  Ellen, caught between a buzzer, Alastair Sim and Chas pulling on her sleeve, could only manage: ‘It’s starting.’

  ‘They don’t show no ads,’ the candy bar girl added.

  ‘When?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘Whenever we decide to go.’

  Ellen knew that there was no use trying to make sense of it now. Within minutes the five of them sat lined up on their pew, licking Choc-Tops which tasted sweeter to the accompaniment of high violins and the credits for The Happiest Days of Your Life. Strange, Joseph thought, smiling at Ellen with her face changing through various shades of confusion. Even Margaret Rutherford wasn’t enough to cheer her up, eighty-one minutes of wicked school-girl comedy passing like so much Mahler on her father’s radio.

  The sky finally darkened, thunder crashed in the distance of the Barossa ranges and the audience let out a collective sigh. The wind picked up, blowing dust out of lifeless curtains and triggering an epidemic of sneezing. Moments later the rain started, lightly, and then before anyone realised, blanketing the town torrentially, drowning out Rutherford doing battle with impish school-boys, eliciting a small, miraculous round of applause from an audience in a fantasy of summer-ended, although later they’d realise it hadn’t. For the next twenty minutes no one could hear what the actors were saying, but didn’t care too much, realising their hibiscus and hydrangeas were getting the soaking they needed. With subsistence came reality and the realisation that the good bits, like film night, were few and far between. It didn’t take much to catch up with the plot and when the rain returned in fits and starts no one made too much of it.

  At eleven o’clock the lights came back on and people sat stunned in their pews. Standing up they made their way out through the locked up foyer, back onto the street. Walking home down Murray Street, already dry again, Ellen didn’t say a word until Joseph said, ‘I have a paid day off on Wednesday.’

  ‘We can all go somewhere,’ she offered.

  Joseph nodded his head. ‘I’m going to Adelaide. Jim’s lent me his car.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To look for a rental, for us.’

  The children ran about on the grass of a small reserve, attempting to stand on each other’s elongated shadows from a newly emerged moon. The grass was clipped short and all Ellen could think to say was how much it looked like the Streims’ new wool-blend carpet.

  ‘So?’ Joseph said, at last.

  ‘This is your … ultimatum?’

  ‘Ellen, I’m not getting back into that.’ Next it’d be how they hadn’t planned, or saved enough, or thought through the options. How he didn’t realise how good they had it, how happy the kids were, how much they all loved the valley. It was an endless script.

  ‘I’ve decided,’ he said.

  ‘And what about me?’

  ‘Always you. You’ve never seen my side.’

  ‘I’ve always defended you, when …’

  He smiled at her. ‘I’ve had enough of talking. I’ve decided.

  Next Wednesday I’ll find a rental. They’ll even pay my relocation.

  I can start in the city the following Monday.’

  Not I can. I will.

  ‘Now you decide. I’m not hanging around waiting for Miller.

  If you stay, I’ll do everything I can to get the kids. I support them, I decide. Okay?’

  Ellen had stopped walking. He turned and looked back at her – ‘Are you coming?’ – and felt her presence a few steps behind him, head down, heard her cursing the rain which had turned their town into a giant pressure-cooker.

  The following Friday, just before lunch, Joseph unlocked the door to the Tabrar family’s new three-bedroom flat. It wasn’t Elizabeth, but it would do, for now. He opened the windows and walked out onto the back balcony, overlooking the Klemzig Tennis Club and a pair of trotters pacing the track around the GAZA football oval. A group of hausfraus in tennis skirts attempted jumping jacks on the grass, collapsing one by one in Klemzig’s version of the League of Health and Beauty.

  Joseph came back in and sat on the lounge, hitting it and filling the room with dust. Semi-furnished, the ad had promised. Fully appointed. Just off North East Road. Ten minutes from the city. Serviced by four bus routes.

  One of which he’d caught from the city, taking up most of the back seat with his duffle bag as Klemzig Germans chatted in broken English. He was aware of the connection, but time had been against him on Wednesday, and after four or five flats they all started looking the same. This was the area where Pastor Kavel had first settled his boatload of Prussian crackpots, setting them up in the bush beside the Torrens, miles away from the English settlers. Naming the area after his old home-town, he soon had them building wattle and daub huts, thatching roofs and whitewashing walls in a down-market fachwerk. Trees were felled and vegetables grown, carried into Adelaide and sold at the markets.

  Within a few years, settlement had spread out from Adelaide, along a new road which passed within a mile of them. Kavel took it as a bad sign. Soon his followers would be building pubs and trading all manner of horse flesh on street corners. Maps were consulted and a distant paradise decided upon. Beside the banks of the North Para River he would found a town called Langmeil, with its suburbs of Tanunda and Dorien. Streets would be given names like Sobels and Traeger, honouring other pioneers in a gesture which would last until the Great War, when the trucks arrived with their Anglicised street signs.

  Many decided to stay on at Klemzig, having grown tired of Kavel with his endless rantings about the imminent Apocalypse and Saxons and Celts being thrown into a hell of untamed Aborigines and cholera. They grew their vegetables and smoked wurst until they were overcome by the promised pubs and boarding houses which soon ran the length of Osmond Gilles Road.

  A hundred years later there were still pockets of Prussia: a few bakeries, a pioneer cemetery with a few headstones of anchors and grapes never grown. Fruit shops and early stone cottages surrounded by fibro monstrosities already cracked down the spine. No one came looking for the Germans because they were too hard to find. If the locals wanted a touch of the Kraut they’d go to the Barossa.

  Joseph had caught the bus in front of the Tanunda Institute at eight o’clock that morning, after having dressed and shaved as Ellen lay in bed, refusing to say goodbye or good luck. Eventually he took his bag and whispered, ‘Bye.’ Waiting and then closing the door behind him. Going into the children’s room and waking them up, explaining how they’d join him soon, when everything could be organised. How things would be better in the city, dozens of movies screening day and night, trolley buses and trams, gelati and, best of all, a world without end, where they could study hard and become journalists, teachers, pianists, anything – having their own children and growing old beside a sea of inexhaustible tides. No one in their ears, day and night, telling them how rotten humans were and how the drinkers and laughers and watchers of Francis the mule would all end up in Hell.

&
nbsp; He travelled down the road Arthur had walked, past the earthworks of Elizabeth and Parafield Airport with its Viscounts and Constellations, past the abattoirs, the outer suburbs and into the city itself. Getting off in Franklin Street, he asked where he’d catch the 273, and trudged with his bag four blocks to Grenfell Street. Getting on the bus, he realised he didn’t have anything smaller than a ten-pound note, running into a deli for change as the driver and a busload of hot passengers waited. They drove past the Botanic Gardens, Collinswood and seventeen stops worth of well-clipped suburbs with their pittosporums and agapanthus, oleanders and multi-coloured gnomes. Getting off at O.G. Road, he headed off towards Klemzig, every bit as much a pioneer as Kavel.

  Now, as he nodded off on his lounge, the smell of fresh yeast blew in on a light, warm, northerly breeze. He smiled. That was the hard part done, the rest would be simple. Before Christmas there’d be a car, and next year a house. None of the ironstones and black kitchens of Tanunda. Something modern. Cream brick with a galvanised iron roof, acres of kentucky bluegrass and a concrete footpath. Kids on Malvern Star bikes and church on Sunday, perhaps, if there was nothing better to do.

  Wednesday night – two nights ago – flashed back at him. Arriving back from the city he’d taken Ellen into the garden and told her what he’d found. ‘It’s close to everything, a butcher and a laundry.’

  ‘It doesn’t have one?’

  ‘You can sit on the balcony and watch the footy.’

  ‘But it doesn’t have a laundry?’

  Just as he’d expected. ‘The money will still be in our account, every Thursday,’ he consoled her. ‘Until you’re ready.’

  ‘For what?’ she’d asked.

  ‘To join me. What else?’

  ‘It’s that simple?’

  ‘Yes.’

  At which point Mary came out and smiled at them. ‘Tea’s ready.’

  ‘Coming, Mum.’

  ‘Enjoy your day in Adelaide, Joe?’

  ‘Thanks … Mum.’

  Stirring himself in the half-light of the flat, the smell of yeast gone, staring up at a ceiling of vintage cobwebs, he wondered who would have the most patience. If she’d write him off and refuse to touch his money, asking her father or applying for the Deserted Wives Pension, accepting Sunday collections taken on her behalf.