Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  ‘Just leaving,’ Bluma said, standing, turning away from the maid as she pretended to fix her hair.

  ‘Shall I fix your bed?’

  ‘Yes, that would be fine.’

  She passed quickly out into the hallway and William was waiting there, standing with his arms crossed, leaning against a wall of crimson-red wallpaper. ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’ he asked.

  She was nowhere near as confident, standing slumped, red-faced and fighting for breath. After a few moments she said, ‘I suppose so.’

  Over the next hour, drinking coffee and eating stale torte at the Zinfandel tea rooms, William did what he did best: talk her around to seeing things his way. The old William Miller, the crackpot, the zealot, was gone, he promised. From now on their life would be like it used to be: everyone happy and sociable. His dates would be his dates, he promised. Kept as secret as their bank balance.

  Bluma knew she should have stayed angry, but she couldn’t. In the end it was much easier to believe what he said, like Joshua and Seymour had. William was good on the attack, but weak on the retreat. He could convince some people of anything, she guessed.

  He’d even made an artform of avoiding saying he was wrong, or sorry. And still people believed him. Or at least humoured him.

  Bluma sat staring into her coffee, retreating into a silence of words thought but not said. Although she’d think, later, that this episode was the closest she’d come to saying, William, you’re a drongo. I really don’t know how I ended up …

  But then censoring even her thoughts.

  From now on, she thought, as they walked home together, as William barked incessantly in her ear, she’d leave her disagreements to lino and mud on boots and a million inconsequential things she knew he’d give in to.

  A few days later the weather broke. William told Bluma it was time to face the sly looks and bemused grins he knew awaited them. And so, on March 26, with his clothes freshly pressed, his head held high and a smile stretching from one ear to the other, he took his string bag, put his arm in Bluma’s and closed the door behind them. He covered the length of Langmeil Road and Elizabeth Streets, greeting old neighbours (who no longer bothered rushing inside to avoid him) and stopping at the Eclipse deli to arrange for his newspaper and milk deliveries.

  ‘For how long?’ the shop-keeper asked, smiling.

  ‘I’ll give you notice,’ William replied, refusing to be baited. No handbills or rallies this time, as promised. No rush to convert or save souls; in fact, no use trying to persuade anyone.

  The sun was receding from the earth, allowing the grapes to finish to perfection. There were bottles to wash and then the harvest, again, reminding them that the cycle came full circle, compensating simple mortals for the bruising and losses of another year. A breeze from the south-west rattled carob leaves in a painfully familiar synthesis of smell and sound, of things seen, remembered, forgotten, someone’s uncle dead in the ground five years now, no, it couldn’t be that long, or could it …

  William and Bluma sat on the bench in front of the Tanunda Club and watched the world pass by. William looked in his jacket pocket for a musk but found a bunch of stapled papers. Opening them out he smiled and showed Bluma his name-change application. ‘Look, I never got around to posting it.’

  She shook her head. ‘You were never serious, Wilhelm.’

  ‘I was.’

  She looked into his eyes and smiled. It was his way of buying lino. She ripped the application into tiny pieces and let them blow away in the breeze.

  ‘I was serious,’ he repeated, stretching out his legs and putting his hands behind his head. ‘Like other things, people make it too difficult. You give in, you compromise.’

  Bluma looked up to see Ellen Tabrar standing before them, hands on hips, her face as cold as the granite soldier they all avoided on Anzac Day. ‘Bob Hope double-bill, next week,’ she began. ‘You like Bob Hope, William?’

  ‘Can’t say I do.’

  Ellen stared at him. ‘And Amgoorie tea. They’re just about giving it away at Mackenzie’s. You shop at Mackenzie’s, William?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mackenzie’s is best. Cheap.’

  Why won’t she look at me? Bluma thought. ‘Where you off to?’ she asked.

  ‘Home,’ Ellen replied, glancing at Bluma but then returning her stare to William. ‘Joe wrote. He said it would be a great disappointment. That’s what he called it: the Great Disappointment. Wasn’t much great about it.’

  ‘In what sense?’ William asked.

  ‘In any sense.’

  ‘It was a big disappointment. But I’ve moved on. I’ve worked out where I went wrong.’

  She smiled. ‘Where’s that?’

  He explained his refiguring, and how it meant they should have been waiting for March next year, but how there’d be no point trying to convince people now. Except for the few. ‘Like your dad. You gotta tell him I want to talk to him.’

  But Ellen just looked at Bluma and said, ‘They’ve got chenille dressing gowns, blue and pink.’

  Bluma smiled and bowed her head as, without revealing any of her own plans, Ellen smiled a sort of goodbye and walked off.

  Bluma looked at William and said, ‘She’s got Joseph on her mind,’ but he didn’t reply.

  They stood up and kept walking. Passing the Apex, Ron Rohwer emerged with an armful of pasties, realising too late but deciding to make the most of it. ‘William, Bluma … must be time to crush again, William. You need a hand, you call out, eh?’

  William made an effort, if only for Bluma’s sake. ‘Thanks, but I’ve got Seymour gonna help me.’

  ‘Expecting a good harvest?’

  ‘Never know till it’s done.’

  ‘Of course. Still, you need a hand, you call.’

  And then Bluma saved the day. ‘I’ll see you on Sunday, Ron.’

  ‘Good.’ Ron looked at William. ‘That’d be fine, eh? I’ll tell Pastor Henry.’

  William didn’t want to tell him about his new dates, shaking his hand, upsetting his pasties and passing on. ‘Two-faced bastard,’ he said, as they walked.

  ‘As hard for him as it is for you,’ Bluma replied.

  ‘Garbage. As long as I go back to church. See the error of my ways.’

  Compromise, more and more, dragging him down into the gutter. Maybe he’d have to become a recluse after all, avoiding the misunderstanding which loomed above his head. And then he saw Joshua Heinz, a hundred yards away, heading towards him. He stopped, thought, grabbed Bluma’s arm and said, ‘I’ll see you back there.’

  William walked home as quickly as his legs could carry him, locking himself in his study, taking his pen and writing, again and again, in his grandfather’s Bible, The Great Disappointment, The Great Disappointment.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ellen helped Vicky load the last of their four suitcases into Seymour’s hearse. They piled in and Mary turned the key in the ignition, sparking a clang of metal, a car full of laughter and the grin of Michael Haddad, their Lebanese postie. Mary fought with the column-shift, looked at Ellen, crossed her fingers and tried again. The hearse chugged to life and everyone smiled, except Vicky, who flung open the back door and ran towards the house. ‘Hold on.’

  ‘Hurry up,’ Ellen called, trying to wind down the window, eventually giving up and pushing it down with her hands. Vicky jumped down the steps and flew along the garden path, smiling and hugging her Hollywood Annual, Stewart Grainger grinning on the cover as he made up for another scene.

  They drove past the Bowls Club, refugee Anglicans in white standing in full sun, adjusting the tops of wool-blend socks which wouldn’t stay up, retreating to the shade of the Fargus Barker Memorial Lean-to, unscrewing thermoses full of hot tea and pouring it into chipped mugs. In the back-blocks, beyond the club, Moy’s chaff-mill worked at full steam, loading wheat bags into carts pulled by teams of four horses, drivers sitting twelve feet high on top of the loads, holding reins so long they had to be made espec
ially. Past the Anglican church and Wohler’s, the Apex and Tanunda Motors, Doph Gordon standing beside a Humber with a look of satisfaction. Nothing I’ll miss, Ellen guessed. Just things I’m familiar with. Like where they kept the Rice Bubbles at Mackenzie’s, or which doctors you could trust to keep quiet.

  Both of the boys were full of excitement and anticipation, ready to reclaim their father and hold him to his promises of endless cinemas with endless choices, Francis the mule stretching into a future of popcorn and choc-tops, marking the years with stories infinitely more enjoyable and believable than Mr Miller’s. Flying carpets and bearded women and milkshakes the flavour of chewing gum, classrooms minus crucifixes on every wall, homes minus rising damp and bakeries minus endless slabs of custard cake. Butchers stocked with fritz and lamb roasts and newsagents risking the wrath of God to stock Superman.

  Vicky had mixed feelings, unhappy to be leaving so many friends behind. ‘We’ll come for visits all the time,’ Ellen had consoled, but that wasn’t the same. She’d even miss Mr Rechner, who’d always had plenty of time for her, considering her connection with William and her father’s move to Adelaide. But in the end Ellen had convinced her, brought her to the understanding that family was more important than anything, which is why Joseph had had to do what he’d done. To keep them together for an eternity of small things.

  As they pulled into the station carpark the train was already waiting. Mary dented Seymour’s bumper-bar on a date palm, wrestled the shift to select ‘park’ and killed the motor. She watched as her daughter and grandchildren each carried their own suitcase, full of only a fraction of what they owned. The rest would follow in a month or so, after Joseph finally got the keys to the house he’d selected.

  Mary was dreading the arrival of the moving van; not only because of its finality, but because of the emptiness it would leave behind, the dilemma of what to fill the spaces with once she’d cleaned up the dust and mopped away the sauce stains. As she wandered like a ghost, Seymour telling her to get a hold of herself.

  Mary watched through the window as Ellen settled her children in economy class and returned to the platform. As the whistle blew, Ellen took her mother’s hand and said, ‘We won’t be far.’

  Mary smiled. Although it should have been a special moment, it just seemed bleak, full of unreconciled endings and worse, William’s voice in her ear, reading from the Bible on the night of the not-so-great disappointment. Mary kissed her daughter on the cheek and hugged her, holding her tight and waving to the children with her one spare hand, then turning and walking down the ramp, already planning her first visit.

  The highlight of the journey down was curried-egg sandwiches and a lay-over in Gawler to take on water. Close to the city the train stopped a hundred yards south of North Adelaide station, heat radiating up through the floorboards from gravel warmed by an April sun that couldn’t shake summer. They waited for almost half an hour, as voices shouted to each other from the front of the train, as cylinders cooled and coal lost its glow in the boilers.

  And then, climbing into their carriage, appearing in the doorway, a postal worker in a sweat-soaked shirt. Joseph kneeling down as his children ran to him. They took him back to Ellen and he sat next to her, holding her hand. ‘It came over the speakers at Adelaide …’

  Overhearing, other passengers moaned and stood up, making for the carriage door and a long walk home, calling for the conductor and asking if there’d be a bus. ‘Soon,’ he promised, looking towards the city in the near distance, its sandstone and granite polished in the heat haze, dressed with billboards and plane trees with burnt leaves.

  ‘Welcome to Adelaide,’ Joseph grinned, carrying two of the four suitcases across the tracks, giving way to a C.R. shunt in search of its load. The two boys, unable to imagine a better way of starting their new lives, half-dragged, half-carried the other two cases behind their father. Mother and daughter followed, tripping and supporting each other, lost in fits of laughter they couldn’t explain.

  Although Joseph could, delivering his family out of the mouth of disaster. A lonely figure, a little excited, carrying his sense of duty lightly, leading them towards the green of the North Adelaide links, wondering how he was going to fit so many people and so many bags into the clapped out Morris he’d just bought on hire purchase.

  Just as he’d expected.

  William watched from his back window as Bluma nattered to Edna over the fence. He made a coffee and she was still there, cut up the potatoes for tea, put them in a pot and checked again. By now Bruno had joined them, waving a stick of wurst about in the air as some sort of peace offering. William watched, but refused to go out. It seemed there was only one path. Solitude. Like Jesus in the desert, doing his best to avoid the Hermanns of the world.

  She came in and presented him with the sausage, but before she could speak he said, ‘I know, I saw,’ slicing up carrots and dropping them into the water.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ she said.

  ‘No, it’s alright.’

  She put her hands on her hips, staring at him coldly. ‘Come out and say hello.’

  He took his time to answer. ‘No. Not that I wouldn’t be civil.’

  Thinking, they don’t mean to gloat, but they do.

  Bluma shrugged. ‘You underestimate people. They’re happy to let you be.’

  He nodded his head. ‘No …’

  She took out pork chops, and flour, and started to dust them. They worked on in silence, anticipating each other’s next move, adding wood to the stove, descending into the cellar for pickled beans.

  That night, as rain pounded down on their roof, William left Bluma alone and walked down the hall towards his study. He noticed an envelope under the front door, minus name or explanation. (Delivered by a young boy who happened to be walking past the Langmeil gates as Henry emerged. ‘You Doph Gordon’s boy?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Do an old fella a favour, will yer?’)

  William closed his study door and opened the envelope, flattening out an article hastily torn from a magazine, a few passages underlined in red, the author careful to avoid any handwriting which might give him away.

  The article was a criticism of the Millenialists, comparing their ‘creaky chiliastic ideas’ with every Christian folly from the Crusades through to the Salem witch trials. The author, an American professor of theology, used strings of four and five syllable words to bring down the zealots who were harming Christianity – the Christianity of tolerance and understanding, healing and serving the poor.

  Eventually the professor got onto dates, and how they could never be trusted. The Millenialists make assumptions which don’t hold true, he claimed. A two-page list outlined and demolished them all. William didn’t have to look for the ones which applied to him. Someone had already underlined them. For instance, the author argued, the fallacy of the ‘cleansing of the sanctuary’, outlined in Daniel 8: 14, which apparently stood for Christ’s return to earth, although this was never actually said. Or the decree of Artaxerxes, apparently issued in 457 BC, but if anyone actually bothered to read Daniel … Oh yes, Cruden’s had it right, but where in Cruden’s did it explain how an ancient year equalled 365 days? Who was to say a day in prophetic writing represented a modern year? And even if the maths was right, didn’t the Bible contradict itself when the Gospel of Mark claimed no man knoweth the time, or when Matthew explained that even the angels in heaven were kept in the dark.

  The list went on, scrawls of red down the page, and over onto the next. William stopped reading. This time a year ago he would have got out his matches and burnt the pages. This time he just folded them, replaced them in the envelope and locked them in his desk drawer. It was obvious he’d have to set aside a lot of time to dispute it, through research and reading, commentaries on the Bible and a fair dose of faith. He could do it. And maybe he’d make an argument. But who’d believe him, who’d even listen to him anymore? He turned off the light and went into bed, trying to keep this though
t out of his head. Over the next few days it would return, and he would feel the ground shifting beneath his feet like never before.

  It was a Sunday. The rain cleared and Seymour arrived early to help William with the harvest. Bluma kept them in coffee and cake and towards the end of the first row Seymour said, ‘Ellen mentioned you’d come up with another idea?’

  Come up with? William emerged from behind vine leaves to explain. By the time he’d finished he knew Seymour wasn’t convinced. ‘It could be, William …’ Working on in silence, like Bluma, unable to find words for what he was thinking. William, meanwhile, retreated into his final consolation, the voice on the Hill of Grace, speaking to him and him alone, telling him things that were as true then as they were now. A voice without specifics, challenging him to seek the truth and tell it to others. And what if it took twenty attempts, or three consecutive lifetimes? Stiff. This is what he’d been asked to do.

  He sat down, took a small Bible from his pocket and started reading. Seymour sat beside him and listened, hearing words that didn’t add up to anything anymore.

  ‘“There be some that stand here which shall not taste of death till they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power …”’

  William looked at Seymour. ‘Are you with me?’

  Seymour sighed and bowed his head. A pair of crows started up in a distant sugar gum. The sun broke through cloud and the last of the rain on the vine leaves glistened, with every colour all at once. William knew he shouldn’t expect a reply, knew that Seymour would never be against him, but would never be with him again. He put the Bible back in his pocket and stood up, taking a heavy bunch of grapes and cutting them from the vine. After a few seconds Seymour followed suit and they worked on together.