by Alan Collins
Flo stared unblinking into my eyes. I was fixed by her intensity. She spoke again in a toneless voice. 'Between the end of the Gospel age and the beginning of the New Earth State, there will be a thousand-year period,' she shifted her gaze to her mother, 'called the millennium. That's the second coming of Christ, the first resurrection of the righteous dead on this earth.'
The hairs on the nape of my neck bristled at the mention of death. She went on, 'The binding of Satan and the translation of the righteous to heaven . . .' There was a scraping of a chair as Jack stood up and left the room. '....will mark the beginning of this period. During this time, the wicked will be dead on this earth, Satan and his angels will be confined here in solitude and the righteous will be in heaven with Christ.'
In the instant that Flo paused, June winked at me and told her sister to put a sock in it. Flo, in a teasing voice, went on 'Never met a Jewish boy before. I mean, what's it like? Do you believe in hell, Alan?' I shook my head; I didn't trust myself to speak.
Merle said, 'How would he know? I mean really, Alan, would you?' She went back to her stirring. But Flo had lost her audience of one and was silent.
I was left to ponder on resurrection and hell; Satan I left well alone. Merle finally stopped stirring her pot and announced that, it being Friday, tonight was bath night because, she said, like you Jewish people, we are going to the meeting tomorrow. That's Saturday of course, like you people. It's our turn for the visiting pastor. He's like your rabie, no, I've got that wrong, haven't I Alan, it's rabbi, isn't it? (Merle having one of her very rare jokes?) June giggled. Jack took no part other than to turn to me and tell me that I could go with the girls later and collect twigs for the chip bath-heater. I hoped their pastor would not be old, bearded, bent, smelly and speaking funny English like the rabbi at the Bondi Road School of Arts synagogue. Jack looked at the clock on the sideboard. 'Chr... and he stopped short, 'half the morning's gone, Alan, and we've done nothing.' With enormous relief, I followed him out the back where Mickey was already hitched to the plough. I knew it from the drawings in The Land.
The cultivation started right outside the Bayswaite back fence. The land ran down to the edge of the Hawkesbury River. I could hear a pump's asthmatic gasps. That was where Jack had been when he quit the room after depositing me. The sun glinted on the water starting to trickle down the fur rows. Jack told me to sit up on the iron seat I had admired so much in The Land. I was still wearing my socalled best clothes from Paddy's Market, of course. He passed me the reins (again Mickey knew just what to do) and walked alongside the draught horse. As soon as we were a fair distance from the house, Jack unhooked a little bag from under the seat and took out his tobacco pouch.
'Will you keep shtum about the smokes, Alan?'
I nearly fell off the bloody seat in amazement. Shtum? Where on earth did he pick up this Yiddish word from? Of course I would keep quiet.
'Wake up, young'un. Y' don't live in Bondi with the Jews for years without learning a bit of the lingo.'
I looked back at the precision furrow. Mickey the wonder horse, I thought - a darn sight smarter than the cowboy horses I saw at the pictures. Jack hopped up on the drawbar to add his weight, causing the plough blade to dig a bit deeper. His voice now came from behind me. 'What do you make of what the missus and the girls were saying to you?'
'I don't know,' I answered truthfully.
'Yeah.'
I watched the birds scratching for uncovered worms. 'Did they mean . . . well, what Flo said about dead people rising and all that, is that right, Jack?'
He flicked his cigarette end away making sure the upturned soil buried it. 'I'm sorry, Alan, you got thrown into the deep end of all that stuff. Personally, I can live without it. You know my mum, she thinks it's a lot of rubbish and poor old Frank, well you've seen him, poor bugger's brain rattles around in his head. And then there's my youngest brother, Greg. He's a copper. Good bloke, Greg - for a copper.'
I hadn't noticed that we had reached the end of the paddock. The pump's wheeze was louder now. Mickey, thank goodness, knew when to turn and brought us back to line up ever so neatly for the next run. I said to Jack, mantoman, 'Yair, we've got a lot of that sorta bullshit too.'
He poked me in the back. 'Y' know what, Alan? I believe in my paddocks full of spuds and God or someone sending the rain at the right time.' He hopped down from the drawbar, looked down at the soil and walked on in silence to the home fence. Here he ordered me down from the seat. 'Get inside and see if you can make yourself useful.'
Merle showed little interest in me, especially about why I was spending the school holidays on her farm, but already I was nervous about being quizzed by her on my being Jewish and our beliefs of which I was lamentably ignorant. I had never seen her visit her motherinlaw, although once or twice I had heard Jack giving a tongue-lashing to 'poor old Frank'. She probably got a bit of my story from Jack who got it through his garrulous, gossipy mother. Now Merle led me outside the weatherboard house with its verandah on three sides. One end of the return that was half-enclosed finished up against a dunny. Later I learned they were proud of being one of the few families with an 'indoor' that flushed. The bathroom, although inside the house, shared a common lath and plaster wall with the dunny. Sounds and sometimes smells that I was sensitive to since my days with all those women who had held me to them through my babyhood, wafted through the wall vents.
Walking back from the dunny, Merle stopped and opened a door off the verandah. 'Nice room, this, Alan, gets a bit of sun. This should be alright for you. Not too far from the lavvy, either.' Merle would never see the funny side of this last remark to me, who slept with his feet in a laundry and his head up against a dunny door.
I walked behind her thin, almost shadowless figure back to the kitchen. June and Flo had pushed the breakfast things far enough away from them to lay out their schoolbooks. They shared a bottle of Swan ink, blotter, pencils and a fat rubber. I said, stupidly, 'Isn't it school holidays up here, too?'
With one voice, the two girls responded, 'We don't go to school, we . . .'
'You're having me on, aren't you?' I chipped in.
Merle said, 'I teach them. I used to be a school teacher. Now we have homeschool here. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...'
June sighed. 'Wednesday we go to Mrs Levin in Windsor for dressmaking.'She looked at me. 'I reckon she's Jewish or something. Y' know, looks sort of foreign. Would you be able to tell, Alan?'
'You girls talk too much, I've told you before, gossip is evil and against the word of our Lord Jesus.' Merle looked to me for understanding. She told me in a confidential manner, excluding the two girls, 'Mrs Levin is a sort of war widow like as if her hubby had been a soldier. Well, he was, kind of. He was in the Australian army, not real soldiers, Alan, just refugees that the army used for labour. He was sent to us once to help with bagging the potatoes but, my goodness, he was as slow as a wet week. Jack put up with it only because he made him laugh by teaching him words in half a dozen foreign languages.' She gave a slight frown of disapproval and went on. 'Anyway, her hubby, the poor man, Gottfried was his name, got terribly sick and died. Mrs Levin had to support herself so she took up dressmaking. The army would not give her a pension or anything on account of her hubby was not a real soldier. Jack wrote to everybody for poor Heide, that's her Christian name - oh, aren't I stupid - of course she wouldn't have a Christian name, would she?'
While she talked to me the girls had pretended to beimmersed in the New South Wales river systems, tracing the course of the Darling which even I could see from their drawing was in danger of flowing into Alice Springs a thousand miles away!
Merle ordered all three of us to scout around for tinder for the chip heater. Flo went one way and June grabbed my hand and guided me into a clump of paperbark trees where twigs were plentiful. This was the first opportunity I had of seeing her full height. Half a head taller than me and about as skinny as I was, she was as fair as I was dark, well, not actually dark, my oli
ve skin was a shiny brown from the Bondi sun and surf. June cleared a space under the tree, took off her school jumper, stretched out on the ground and put the jumper under her head.
I had found a big strip of paperbark. I remember seeing in books how the Aboriginal women made baskets from them. June called to me and patted the ground beside her. My heart thumped. I ignored it manfully and went in search of tendrils of vine to tie up the ends of the paperbark, though I knew I would be a real mug at paperbark basket-making. Then June in her bossiest voice once more ordered me to sit beside her. Idiotically I asked her why she wore a school jumper if she did not go to school. 'Mum reckons it helps to remind us that we really are in school even though we are really at home.'
I filled the 'unforgiving minute' questioning June about what she and Flo learned having her mum as their teacher, but I was not really listening or all that interested in her answers as they drifted upwards into the blue. Maybe I was mesmerised by her outstretched form. Carelessly shoving the paperbark away, I picked up the few twigs June had pushed aside when she had stretched out. As I bent down near her she grabbed my wrist and I tumbled over, dismayed at finding my hand had plunged into her belly.
She held it there. In a tight voice she said, 'It's awfully lonely, Alan, just Miss knowitall Flo and me. We never get to see . . . anyone.' Her voice trailed off into a sob. She released her grip on me and sat up. There was no doubt both of us were embarrassed. 'Oh dear,' she said quite primly, 'there'll be cold showers all round if we don't keep the chip heater stoked. Y' know Flo and me share the bath and mummy and daddy...' She broke off, 'Oh dear, that just leaves you on your own, Alan!'
As June had expected, when we trudged back to the verandah with our twigs, Flo stood there proudly beside her stack. She smirked, 'Enough for four baths, d'you reckon?'
I left the sisters and went into the room Merle had given me. I breathed in deeply. The tiny room was dominated by a cream-painted iron bedstead, a snow-white pillow, a handwoven checked rug . . . then I exhaled, 'Shit, oh my bloody God, shit, a proper fuckin' bed.' I had never heard myself swear out loud like this but, shit, I excused myself, this was an occasion. In my whole life I had not slept in a proper bed. When you add up the years on the bumpy couch at Uncle Harry's and the misery of the camp stretcher at 48 Francis Street . . . well, I could be forgiven (by whom?) for my swearing.
By whom? I took in the coloured picture of small children with angel wings sprouting from their backs, another of draught horses with knowing eyes. I sat on the bed, stood up and sat down again, giggling at the musical twanging of the bedsprings. A wardrobe with a full-length mirror leaned against the wall. Another blood. . . no, no need to swear any more. Apart from the mirror in the chemist shop in Bondi Road, I hardly ever saw myself from head to toe, yet here I was, still in my best clothes and looking pretty good, I thought. I kicked off my shoes and laid myself down carelessly on the rug. Sleep, in a real bed, in the afternoon, on a weekday, what bloody next? Yeah, what next?
...10...
Saturday morning, dressed in my Paddy's Market dusted- down almost clean clobber, shoes buffed to a semblance of shine, I left the shelter of my bedroom and waited around at the furthest corner of the verandah. I still had the remnants of Sanitarium WeetBix stuck to my teeth. I had to force the unpasteurised rich creamy milk down, the two girls watching me like a pair of chicken hawks eyeing off a lone fieldmouse. Their parents ate thick slabs of toast spread with peanut butter. Jack, in a suit, the coat on the back of his chair, his braces stretched taut against his chest, washed the toast down with two mugs of, not tea or coffee - not on the Seventh-day Adventist permitted food list - but a sludgy drink made from dissolving two heaped teaspoons of Marmite in his mug. I soon cottoned on to the fact that nuts, soybean and the ubiquitous Marmite were among the staples from which a multitude of dishes derived.
Lucky Mickey, lucky because he got fresh lucerne for brekky, stood harnessed to the dray, no doubt pleased he didn't have to plod the miles of potato furrows today, Saturday. Instead, he would haul all of us to the weatherboard church hall and oncea- month cinema in a Pitt Town side street. There, he would be turned loose to graze among the headstones of an ecumenical cemetery, perhaps with one glove-soft ear cocked to choral sounds punctuated by the pastor's sonorous sermon.
The hall was shared among the various Christian sects in the district who, in fairness to one another, affirmed their beliefs with nothing more symbolic than a simple varnished cross fixed flat to the wall. This morning, palm branches were tacked either side of the cross; apart from this other-worldly gesture, the hall maintained a religious neutrality. Merle led us into a pew (rows of ancient cinema seats) indicating wordlessly where each of us was to sit. I was last in, next to Jack who had June next to him, then Merle then Florence. On the hall dais was a highbacked carver chair just like one I had seen in the foyer of the Ashfield Infants' Home. What really jolted me this morning was the pungent smell of bay rum on Jack. I could hardly believe it: my father, Sampson Collins, boulevardier, and Jack Bayswaite, potato farmer, both used the same after-shave astringent! I had no time to explore this amazing coincidence further.
The low hum of fraternal greeting had stopped. I felt a tremor of fear in that moment, the silence of the unknown, of God and of death which to me were inseparable. It had fallen to Uncle Harry and not my father to tell me of my mother's death, which he did during one of our park walks. It was possibly the only time I sat still long enough to hear him out. The unmistakable message he conveyed was that God, prayer and a foolish father were to blame for my motherless status.
Jack's reassuring bulk kept June at a safe distance from me. What was I scared of ? I already had the burden of God and death to carry. Now June loomed as large as the other two as she leaned across her dad towards me. 'Do you want to share my Bible, Alan?'
Jack stood up and the cinema seat sprang up. 'Good idea, June. Won't disturb you when I have to go out and see to Mickey.' He meant while he ducked out for a smoke. He gave me a conspiratorial nudge. June moved into his seat and immediately laid the Bible - and her hand - on my knee. I was about to suffer my worst case of dickytwitch ever. I sneaked a glance down the row to be met by Flo's cynical and knowing look; Merle's head was bowed, the unopened Bible was clasped to her meagre chest; she remained frozen in her devotion until a harmonium on the dais gave out its first audible sigh for the morning. All around me there was the clatter of cinema seats flipping up as the congregation rose. I stood too, then tried to retrieve the book that fell at my feet. Of course there was a muck-up as June bent down, our heads banging together as we struggled to suppress our giggles. I got to it first and unthinkingly kissed it.
June just about exploded with questions. 'Why did you do that, you know, kiss the Bible?'
Could I tell her that this was the custom of us Jews? How I squirmed through all those miserable Saturday mornings spent in the Bondi Road School of Arts synagogue being drilled by our desiccated rabbi on the Five Books of Moses and the even more arcane Talmud? And here I was playing handies with a girl whom I barely understood to be some sort of Christian and kissing a Bible half of which was the New Testament!
God was about to save me. Yeah.
'There is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing . . .'
In the briefest instant it took for my Bible retrieval and kissing, the pastor had materialised on the dais. He stood with one hand on the carver chair, the other against his heart. Even while his voice rattled around the hall, the hand on heart slipped inside his coat. 'Oh crumbs,' I said out loud, 'he's got a crook heart just like Uncle Harry.' Nobody heard me. The pastor, with gathering enthusiasm, took the other hand from the chair and pointed to the ceiling where the beams of sunlight turned the spiders'webs into intricate patterns.
'....God the eternal Son became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Through Him all things were created . . .'
I latched onto the word 'incarnate', a shiny new word, a voluptuous wor
d, a word so sensual it nearly set me off tingling again. All around me the Seventhday Adventists stood respectfully until the pastor paused, then there was a clatter of seats going down. At this point, Jack got to his feet again, his boots thumping the timber floor as he headed to sunshine and a smoke.
There was more stuff from the pastor about suffering for our sins and dying on the cross, more exciting new words like restoration and temptation and . . . virgin! This one I knew of from my forays into Uncle Harry's two volumes of Havelock Ellis. If I stayed long enough on the farm, I might try it out on June. Well, she was older than me and should know a lot more even if she didn't go to school. Or maybe I could toss it in at playtime at Wellington Street High School, where I was supposed to start the following year.
June nudged me. 'You'll never guess who's here, Alan.'
Of course I wouldn't. All I knew was that it was a safe bet I was the only Jew this Saturday morning in a converted cinema in Pitt Town.
'Mrs Levin, the refugee lady who gives us dressmaking lessons.' She leaned across her mother and whispered to Florence, begging for confirmation. Flo obliged, 'That's her, alright.' Merle did not bother to turn and look. 'She's a perfect right to come if she wants to,' she said, adding waspishly, 'looking for customers, I suspect.'
Now my attention was dragged away from the sight of Mrs Heide Levin, dressed up 'to the nines', even with a cloche hat and a jaunty feather and looking nothing like a farmer's wife. The pastor was silent, the harmonium filled the void while two men brought a galvanised washtub onto the dais. Water sloshed around in it until it settled down right in front of the carver chair. The pastor stood to one side, looking, I thought, like a bloke who had thrown a pound note in the air and it had floated down as a tram ticket. Sam used to say that. The pastor had a look of professional gloom with his head bowed over the lectern.
Suddenly, the harmonium ceased its tuneless contribution. The pastor turned the pages of the book, no doubt looking for a good spot to start. I couldn't help comparing this with the way our dry old rabbi rolled the scroll of the Torah back and forth until he too had found a starting place. If I had been a bit more grown-up I'd have known the saying, 'The more things change, the more they stay the same.'