‘Like that,’ said the girl.
‘Yeah, that’s a scream,’ said Tom. Then: ‘Mum and Dad?’
‘Mum’s in Big Church. She always sends me out from screaming.’
‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’
‘June.’
‘June, do you know a boy called Peter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is Peter in Big Church?’
‘Yes. At the front.’
‘And Peter’s mum? Is she in Big Church?’
‘Peter’s mum is Trudy.’
‘In Big Church?’
‘Yes. At the front.’
Tom strode to the church. June saw fit to follow. A hymn was being rendered—‘How Great Thou Art’. The volume increased when Tom opened the heavy timber door. The crowd within filled the church and its annex to bursting. The congregants stood shoulder to shoulder, some holding small children aloft, maybe for the sake of gaining a view of Pastor Bligh. Still keeping up with the hymn, people turned to look at Tom without any approval in their glances.
The church was spare in its ornamentation and art; walls and ceiling painted white, no figure of Jesus, a single vase of yellow chrysanthemums standing on an oblong table beside a white crucifix matching in miniature the one on the exterior. Rows of varnished pews on each side of an aisle ran down to two broad steps leading to what served as an altar, just the table with the flowers and the white cross, and a plain timber lectern. Arched windows of stained glass on each of the side walls depicted John the Baptist on a riverbank, and John’s head on a big golden plate. The plate had been wrought in such a way that it could also have been taken as a halo.
Pastor Bligh in a white vestment stood at the lectern, big-framed, powerful. His thatch of white hair gave him a daunting Old Testament look. He was roaring out the hymn, no voice louder, head raised, arms outstretched. The accompaniment was provided by a Hammond organ played by a woman with hair as white as the pastor’s, dressed in a jarring tunic the colour of a mandarin.
Tom, taller than most, strained to see Peter and Trudy at the front but was thwarted by the congregants bobbing as they sang. The pastor, though, saw Tom. His gaze fixed itself on him. At the conclusion of the hymn, he signalled for quiet, and was obeyed.
‘A visitor,’ said the pastor. ‘Mister Hope. Mister Tom Hope.’ Faces turned to Tom. ‘I’ll ask you to wait outside until we conclude the service, Mister Hope. If you would.’
A commotion broke out at the front. Trudy and Peter had both come to their feet and were seeking Tom in the crowd at the back. Tom waved to make himself more visible. Trudy wasn’t nimble enough to move herself through the pack, but Peter was. He dived and crawled and wriggled his way to Tom’s arms, and was held high. The boy kissed Tom all over his face, like a dog in a transport of affection.
Tom laughed and squeezed, but he was the only one laughing. The expressions on the faces of the congregants were puzzled, or else censorious. When Trudy had battled her way to him, Tom accepted her kiss. But dear God!—Trudy, what a wreck, her eyes sunken in bruise-coloured flesh, her hair hacked into untidy tufts.
‘Tom, Tom, take Peter and run away,’ she whispered. ‘Take Peter and run.’
The crowd parted for the pastor. ‘You’ll come with me,’ he said to Tom, and led the way out through the annex to the open air. Peter remained in Tom’s arms, his skinny legs wrapped around his waist.
The destination was the pastor’s office, a fibro building with a double lock on the stout green door. The pastor applied two keys, swung the door open, and with some impatience waved Tom and Trudy inside. The walls were hung with framed photographs that depicted the pastor in younger years, posed beside locomotives and on the platforms of stations, and one in a boxing ring, gloves raised.
Pastor Bligh drew his vestment over his head and draped it on the back of an old-fashioned swivel chair. He stood in a short-sleeved blue shirt and braces, dark trousers, black shoes.
‘Mister Hope,’ he said. ‘Mister Tom Hope.’
Tom freed an arm from the boy and accepted the pastor’s offered hand.
‘I’d prefer to be clear straight off, Mister Hope. If you don’t leave the property, I’ll knock your block off. I promise you that.’
He said this with a broad smile, as if he wished to split the impact of his greeting between geniality and menace.
‘You probably want to leave here with Peter. You can’t. Peter stays here. Trudy stays here.’
Trudy spoke up in a wretched, pleading voice, ‘Pastor, I want to go. I don’t want Jesus anymore. I want to go.’
‘And I tell you that you will not go. I tell you that for one final time.’
Peter turned his face from the pastor and tightened his grip on Tom.
‘You can’t keep Trudy and Peter here if they want to leave,’ said Tom. ‘They’ve both made it clear that they want to go.’
Pastor Bligh, candidly unconcerned, lifted his chin and nodded. He reached down and opened a drawer of his desk.
‘You probably don’t know, Mister Hope. Trudy signed a document before a doctor and a justice of the peace declaring herself incompetent to care for Peter, and requesting that I take on the role of guardian. This was—three days ago, Trudy? Three days ago.’
Trudy let out a wail. ‘Tom, I didn’t want to! I didn’t want to!’
Pastor Bligh displayed the document he’d taken from his desk drawer, holding it up by the two top corners.
‘Tom, I wanted him to stop hurting Peter. Tom, Pastor hurts Peter. With a strap. He hurts him.’
Tom stared at Trudy’s pale, drawn face, her lips weirdly distorted, downturned, as if arrested in the middle of a scream.
‘What?’
‘Pastor punishes Peter, Tom. With a strap.’
A red mist descended. Tom lowered Peter to the floor. He took a step towards the pastor.
‘Do you hurt this boy? Is that true?’
‘Do I hurt Peter? No. His disobedience hurts him. His lies hurt him. His betrayal of Jesus hurts him.’
Tom’s hand shot out and grasped Pastor Bligh by the throat. Tom had never fought in his life, never seized a man in this way. But he was exceptionally strong. He could heave a full bale of hay from the paddock to the third stack on a truck; lift a redgum post and drop it vertically into the prepared hole.
‘Now you listen to me,’ he said. ‘If you hurt this boy again, I’ll do you harm, Pastor. I promise you that.’
He held the pastor by the throat a few seconds longer, for emphasis. Still enraged, he spoke brusquely to Trudy: ‘This has to be done by law. I’ve got a copy of a letter from Dave Maine for you here. Read it. The same letter’s on its way to you by registered mail.’
Tom turned to the pastor and struck him across the face with the back of his hand. The blow knocked the pastor two staggering steps sideways, left his hair disarrayed and his lower denture askew. He sat himself down heavily in the swivel chair and after a pause of a few seconds, hastily reset the denture.
‘Is that enough?’ said Tom. He seemed in a mood that could accommodate murder.
Pastor Bligh lifted a hand in concession.
Tom reached down and lifted Peter.
‘This has to be done by law, Peter. You understand? It has to be right by law. I’ll come back for you and take you to the farm. I’ll come back. For now, stay with Mum. This man won’t hurt you again. For now, stay with Mum.’
Peter nodded in the grave way he had, his eyes level with Tom’s.
To Trudy, Tom said, ‘Look after him. I’ll be back.’
He took a step towards the door, then, in what seemed an afterthought, turned back and kissed his ex-wife on the forehead.
The little girl, June, was standing by herself on the path of white pebbles that led to the office. Tom paused to place a hand on her head of dark curls and thank her. Just as he reached the fence, June’s ear-splitting scream arrested him. She was still standing where he’d left her, her gaze on him, clapping her hands together softly and s
lowly. ‘It’s loud!’ she called out to Tom.
Chapter 30
JUNE’S SCREAM had been heard so often on the grounds of Jesus Camp that it no longer startled anyone. Pastor Bligh, staring out the window of his office to where Tom Hope’s ute was parked, paid the girl and her madness no attention at all. He was waiting for Tom to climb into his vehicle and depart. His mind was made up.
When the ute left, he said to Trudy, ‘There will be punishment.’ And then, ‘Remain here. Remain standing. Touch nothing.’
He locked the door behind him, obviating his command to Trudy, and strode to the church. The congregants hadn’t left the building, hadn’t even seated themselves. Nor would they, without Pastor Bligh’s say-so. He made his way through the congregation to the altar, raised his hand and spoke the prayer of completion. ‘You may depart,’ he said. He was aware that almost all of those present would have noticed the welt on his face, and the blood that had dried under his nostrils. He called to Mister Bosk, ‘I’ll require your services, Leo.’
Trudy’s sister, Tilly, and mother, Monique, were summoned to the kinder playroom. And Judy Susan, who had been told of the confrontation with Tom Hope and had ministered to the dried blood on her husband’s lip with a damp cloth. Scarlet with anger, she declared that she would herself bring Trudy and the boy to punishment, accepted the keys from Pastor, and made it her business to deal out some advance slaps and ear-twists. ‘We will have two very, very sorry people in a few minutes,’ she said. ‘Don’t count on tears. Tears will get you nowhere.’
Trudy had married Tom with no more than five minutes’ reflection. Periods of protracted thought had never got her anywhere, so she generally adopted the first thing she thought of, including: leaving Tom; teaming up with Barrett; ditching Barrett and returning to Tom; leaving Tom; joining the Christians of Phillip Island. Now, passing the kitchen, it occurred to her that she could duck inside and arm herself with the trimming knife she used in stints on the meal-preparation roster.
Thus inspired, she shrieked, ‘Run!’ and Peter took off, chased by Judy Susan. The congregants were still dispersing, among them a number of men and women and children who responded immediately to Judy Susan’s cry of ‘Stop that boy!’
Trudy, at the same time, hurried into the kitchen where Pastor Bligh’s first wife Margaret was at work on the mutton. Trudy glanced at the knife in Margaret’s hand, looked at Margaret, that seamed face blanched with regret, and implored the woman wordlessly to yield the blade. Margaret returned Trudy’s gaze, then averted her eyes as if she needed privacy for a few seconds. She opened her hand and allowed Trudy to take the knife. Trudy slipped it up the sleeve of her green tunic and pulled the cuff down over her hand.
By the time she stepped back into the chaos outside, Peter was being returned to the jurisdiction of Judy Susan by a brawny fourteen-year-old called Nicky Mack, who had the boy in a neck hold.
‘Got him, Missus Bligh!’
Judy Susan congratulated Nicky and charged him with the responsibility of hauling Peter to the playroom, where his punishment awaited him. As a reward, Nicky would be permitted to watch the thrashing and act as a witness. (Well pleased at the time, Nicky. Not so much later, when he was required to give a statement to the Newhaven police and found it difficult to remember anything except the blood.)
It was the pastor himself who bared Peter’s behind for this session of thrashing. Leo Bosk, presented with the thick leather strap, realised that something was badly wrong. And was troubled. He had no desire to apply the strap to the livid bruises on Peter’s buttocks, and he doubted that Pastor Bligh was in his right mind. He’d never known Pastor to involve himself with a thrashing in this way; never seen him moved by anger.
Leo, with the boy already writhing across his lap, spoke up for himself: ‘Pastor, we shouldn’t.’
‘You say what?’ said Pastor Bligh. ‘You say we shouldn’t? I say we should, and will, Mister Bosk! It’s forty strokes.’
‘Pastor, no. No.’
Judy Susan hurried over to remind Leo Bosk that Pastor’s word was law at Jesus Camp and if Pastor said forty strokes or four hundred, it was his, Leo Bosk’s, duty to do what he was told to do, and with force.
Leo said, ‘We’ve got rules. Pastor’s word isn’t law. We’ve got rules. And I won’t do it, I won’t strap this boy one more time. Look at the mess I’ve made of him.’
Judy Susan, a hearty enemy of disobedience in the camp, or anywhere, spat in the face of Leo Bosk. She seized the strap and might have administered the forty strokes of punishment herself except that Trudy forestalled any further punishment of her son by walking rapidly across the floor to Pastor Bligh and plunging the blade of the trimming knife into his stomach.
The pastor, startled, threw his arms forward and wrapped them around Trudy, and for a short time they seemed to dance, Trudy held upright by the grip of Pastor Bligh as he staggered left and right with his face upturned. Then he was dead on the floor, the bone handle of the knife protruding from his gut.
Leo Bosk quickly stood Peter upright and knelt by the pastor to see if removing the knife would revive him. Judy Susan stood trembling with her hands in her hair. Tilly ran through a scale of screams. Trudy’s mother bolted. Nicky gaped at the spread of the blood on Pastor’s blue shirt once the blade was removed. Trudy went calmly to her son and pulled up his underpants and shorts.
Peter glanced once, then a second time, at the dead pastor. Trudy whispered to him, ‘The police will be coming.’ And Peter nodded.
Chapter 31
THE CWA people accepted Hannah’s judgment on everything to do with the bookshop and book sales, partly because it was her shop and partly because she was brainy and a Jew and would therefore know how to make money. Also, she had suffered in the war, the awful Germans, and probably knew what she was talking about when she said that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Turgenev had to be in every school library. She provided the women with summaries of books she was trying to get into libraries, summaries they read aloud to secondary school librarians.
But Maggie’s authority—Maggie who was struggling valiantly to keep the bookshop of the broken hearted afloat—no, they didn’t accept Maggie’s authority at all. When Maggie gave them summaries, the women said, ‘Maybe.’ And they left behind, accidentally on purpose, Patrick White and Joseph Furphy and Rolf Boldrewood. Jane Austen they were willing to concede. They said, ‘We know what they want, love.’ Hannah had ordered fifty copies of Where the Wild Things Are for primary schools before taking her unscheduled holiday, but the ladies left them to languish. Too odd.
Maggie wept, in secret. When Tom came in, as he did three or four times a week, she looked up from the counter with a question on her face: Any news? But she knew. Tom’s expression was always stern, or withheld. He said, ‘Good on you, Mag. You’re a wonder.’ Or, ‘Good on you, Mag, keep it up.’ But he never said, ‘Can’t say much, Mag, aching heart.’ She wished he would. Because she would say: ‘Mine too. Where is she? It’s wrong. Why has she gone? We love her, Tom.’
She came to the end of her tether. She took the opportunity on a Friday when Tom called in to pay her wages to plead for information.
‘What?’ said Tom. ‘Pardon?’ This was the Friday following the Sunday of his visit to Jesus Camp. Since then, he’d been told by Dave Maine that his ex-missus had murdered Pastor Bligh. Allegedly.
‘Tom, I don’t know anything. Tell me.’
A second wife had run away from him and, really, he’d rather have kept it to himself. But he overcame his reluctance. With Maggie sitting on the wooden stool behind the cash register, a husband and wife browsing upstairs and Penny Holt on her day off from the grout factory looking through the Ladybirds for her granddaughter, Tom spoke in a low voice of Auschwitz. Of Hannah’s husband Leon dead in a week, of her son—Michael, that was his name—who’d vanished forever. And Hannah’s vow: that she would never again be a mother, feed and dress a child, read the child stories, sit at a bedside for hours and days
depressing the boy’s tongue with a spoon to open a channel for breathing, whooping cough, murmur the prayers of her faith over his head, bless God with shouts of joy when he recovered.
‘And now Peter will be coming here to live, I think. I told you about Peter one time.’
‘How?’
‘How what?’
‘How is he coming to live here?’
‘His mum stabbed a pastor.’
‘What?’
‘Have to go, Mag. Talk again later. You’re a marvel.’
Hannah’s vow. What Tom didn’t say, didn’t think of saying, but believed, was that all vows could go to the devil. That’s what could be teased out, picked out from the pain in his heart. All vows could go to the devil, these stones set up as boundaries that endured the weather and the change of seasons and would not alter when all around them was altering each day; everything in the thriving world changing, but the stones unaltered.
David Maine sent a telegram: Call me, urgent. And a bit more. Tom, who made sure he caught the mail each day, waiting on Hannah as he’d waited on Trudy, read the message as soon as Johnny Shields delivered it. Guesswork told anyone with an interest in the matter that Tom had experienced the misfortune of a second wife running away, and Johnny Shields waited on what he might be able to add to the public’s knowledge of the disaster.
‘From Dave Maine up in Shep,’ said Johnny. ‘What’s it say? Haven’t read it, cross my heart.’
Tom, frowning over the yellow slip, said, ‘Wants me to call him.’
‘Yeah? You gonna?’
‘Yes, I am, Johnny.’
‘About the boy? The little bloke you used to have running around here?’ Johnny had developed over thirty years as the RMD postie a psychic something or other that told him things he couldn’t possibly know. It was accepted in Hometown, Johnny’s knack, not as anything like nosiness but as a purely supernatural matter. He could also predict the weather, months off. He’d foretold the big flood, if only people had listened. His advice, in its brevity, was always sound.
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