Hill of Grace Page 2

  ‘He was the least of our concerns,’ Miller continued.

  She smiled one last time and gave him his change. ‘We’re all quick to change our tune.’

  ‘Not me,’ he trailed off, as he dropped the coins in his pocket and exited the shop.

  William sat under a pencil pine and ate his cake as he watched Nathan lose again. Bluma had warned him to keep his comments to himself: Nathan had threatened to stop playing if William kept coaching him from the sidelines. ‘Backhand, Nathan, both hands … watch your footing!’ A shop-keeper’s son from Gawler demolished him in straight sets and they were soon walking home across paddocks overgrown with freesias and wood sorrel.

  As they went, William’s landscape smelt more of sulphur than must, was lit more by atomic flashes than the dusty summer light over the Pewsey Vale Peak. Nathan, meanwhile, had other thoughts on his mind: Lilli Fechner’s green, translucent eyes, her Shirley Temple dimples and her uncanny ability to say something without saying it. Lilli, his hero, the only girl he knew who could publicly humiliate his father without him knowing.

  William Miller passed along the creek which formed the bottom boundary of his property. Wild olive trees, their fruit only of interest to the crows, clung to the banks where floods had washed away the silt and exposed their roots. A white flowering iris crept down from a fallow paddock but mostly the creek was just rocks and the murky water they shared with the Seppelts.

  Harlequin flowers ranged yellow to orange as they followed the path up toward the showground. Off amongst his carnations, Arthur Blessitt, the Miller’s other neighbour, worked on his knees debudding stems as straight as a Cartesian plane. ‘Coming?’ William called, across a paddock Arthur had turned over to roses.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied, standing and shaking his head. ‘Go on without me, I’ve finished the new pins.’

  Arthur watched William continue on toward the showgrounds then made for his lean-to laundry to wash up. After cleaning his face and the back of his neck he grabbed a few bottles of homebrewed beer, his three new kegel pins and set off in a scurry along a path of wild oats William had laid flat.

  Arthur had turned over his property, not entirely forsaking his vines, to cut flowers: lisianthus, carnations, wallflowers, calendulas and in summer, endless fields of sunflowers. Everybody thought he was loopy, although William knew he was making money packing them off to Adelaide twice a week. Department stores, florists and the odd fruit shop had come over to his way of thinking: where others had started making plastic azaleas, he would make a killing with the real thing.

  Arthur was a confirmed bachelor, the only child of parents who’d smothered him with love then demanded he go out to find a bride. He’d brought a few girls home to meet them and they’d quickly sized them up, dismissing them as entirely inadequate. Arthur, who was more interested in his woodwork and flowers anyway, was happy to let a future of nagging and baby vomit pass him by.

  He called after William but saw that his friend was caught up in the cries of a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos come to feed on the soft female cones of a native pine.

  William arrived at the Kegelbahn and put his jacket on the back of a chair. He deposited his few drinks and wurst and said to Julius Rechner, Nathan’s history teacher at the Lutheran school, ‘Arthur is on his way.’

  The kegel club was a single-lane bowling alley built in the form of a long shed. Wives took it in turn to stand at the far end of the alley, re-setting the wooden pins and returning the balls down an angled gutter lined with white cotton. The men stood about in the shed proper, drinking, telling lies about their working weeks and wishing there was another kegel club for them to compete against.

  But there wasn’t. They only had each other, week after week, taking turns to tabulate the same pitiful scores on the same commandeered blackboard, courtesy of Julius.

  ‘What sort of history are you teaching these kids?’ William joked to Julius. ‘Too much of the Austrian. Not enough of the Prussian.’ Referring to Hitler, the upstart who’d been responsible for the demise of their social club and the Goethe Institute.

  Arthur entered, dropping the new pins on the wooden floor. ‘Let’s look at these,’ began Trevor Streim, president of the club, as he picked them up and ran his hands over the oak Arthur had sanded smooth.

  ‘An exact copy,’ Arthur smiled, putting down his beers and producing the original he’d used as a model.

  ‘Good.’ Trevor smiled, holding up a copy against the original.

  ‘But how will they perform?’

  ‘The same properties,’ Arthur defended.

  ‘Still,’ Trevor half-sung, motioning for Rechner’s son to run them up to the ladies.

  ‘Oak develops a ripeness with age,’ Arthur continued, trying to bring perspective, seeing how Trevor Streim was intent on stacking his pins up against others which had been used since the club opened in 1858.

  Mrs Trevor Streim, the first and best matriarch of the Tanunda Kegelbahn, replaced three of the nine pins with Arthur’s and stood back. The room fell quiet as Trevor took a ball and launched it down the lane. It was a strike, of course. As the pins tumbled Arthur pretended to listen but only Trevor could actually hear the dead lignin in the very heart of the pin. As they clattered and settled all eyes turned to the president. ‘Close,’ he said, ‘but I can still tell the difference.’

  Rubbish, Arthur thought, having spent endless hours choosing the right wood and turning it on a lathe in his workshop. ‘You must have the ears of a bat,’ he said, lifting his eyebrows – and for a moment everyone sensed an insurrection.

  ‘It takes a Weidemann hand,’ William said, to break the silence and lighten the mood, referring to Arthur Blessitt as Artur Weidemann, another of the valley’s name-changers who wasn’t yet comfortable changing back.

  ‘Of course,’ Trevor said, retreating. ‘Only Arthur could make such a precise copy. Prosit, Arthur.’

  And with this they all toasted Arthur, although Arthur himself was unhappy with his work being thought of as a copy, compared to its true status as a thing unto itself. In the same way his crucified Christs and scale-model Rx 93 steam were things unto themselves, representing the familiar but in a style which was distinctly Arthur’s. This is what the Streims of the world couldn’t understand.

  The carpet of wood-shavings and sawdust on his workshop floor attested to this – the finely sharpened chisels and his grandfather’s well-oiled lathe. Precise, razor-sharp pencil marks which were followed to the thousandth of an inch, his leather tool-belt and half moon bifocals – these were the signs of a true artisan.

  Arthur and William walked home through the showgrounds, set up for Angus cattle the size of elephants and the dill cucumber championship which Trevor’s wife regularly won. Passing through the Langmeil graveyard Arthur stopped to show William his grandfather’s headstone, cracked neatly down the middle but refusing to yield. The vineleaf-entwined anchor still sung of Hessen and Posen, the town’s founding father, August Kavel, and the promise of thirty-five bushels to the acre. As they made their way back along the familiar creek, William stopped to pick up a tin can he saw reflected in the moonlight. And said, ‘This is the future, if we don’t watch ourselves.’

  On Saturday night, as the Seppelt date palms cast long shadows across the paddocks of West Tanunda, and the sun dipped and flattened itself against a horizon of stray eucalypts, William stood with his hands on his hips in his darkening kitchen as Bluma paced out their living space. ‘Thirty by twenty-four, that’s …’

  William furrowed his brow. ‘Seventy-two square … around eight yards.’

  Bluma’s eyes lit up. ‘William, we could afford at least one room.’

  ‘Bluma.’

  ‘This floor’s no good for my lungs.’

  Bluma had read that patterned lino was out for thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a yard at the Big Store. Still, what was the point? William wouldn’t have a bar of it. Just like the suits they were practically giving away at five-and
-a-half shillings. Same story. She knew he was determined to go on wearing Robert’s. ‘This suit is so dated,’ she’d argue, but in the same way he’d retained his chin whiskers, he would retain his dad’s clothes. As long as they still fit and as long as the naphthalene did its job.

  ‘I’m late,’ he said, consulting Anthelm’s fob-watch, slipping on his jacket and making for the door.

  ‘At least consider it,’ she pleaded, brushing him down as he left.

  As the sun disappeared below the horizon the Langmeil bells rang out across the town, as they did from Gnadenberg and Strait Gate and every other church throughout the valley, reminding everyone that tomorrow was a day of worship.

  William made his way between an avenue of candle pines which led up a hill to Langmeil. At the top, in front of the church’s open oak doors, Joshua Heinz stood smiling, watching William’s progress and sucking on a pipe.

  ‘Evening,’ William greeted him, crunching gravel and stepping over the crumbling steps. ‘Is everyone here?’

  ‘Just about,’ Joshua replied. ‘Apart from Carl Sobels, he sends his apology, apparently his daughter-in-law’s in hospital.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘The voices again. She’s soft, if you ask me.’

  ‘Satan,’ William smiled. ‘What she needs is a good praying over.’

  ‘Running over,’ Joshua grinned at his old friend, tapping out the used tobacco.

  Joshua lived in a three-roomed cottage with his wife and six children, all of whom slept in a single room with triple bunks which Sarah, his eldest, had pointed out, were no different from the ones in Auschwitz. He supported them by selling insurance, and at harvest, helping out with picking here and there. His Bible was just as well worn as William’s, but he didn’t share his friend’s fixation with the promises of Revelations. I’m happy with an old-fashioned Jesus, he’d say to William. A Jesus who buys insurance and stops my milk from curdling.

  While the Tanunda Liedertafel set up for Saturday night’s rehearsal in the Langmeil vestry, the wives of the singers gathered in William’s linoless living-room, talking, drinking coffee and stuffing a quilt for Mary Hicks’ daughter Ellen. It was an impromptu Federschleissen, a quilting-bee sustained by Bluma’s finest rhubarb crumble. The feathers were replaced by a synthetic stuffing Bluma had ordered from a catalogue but not told William about. The coffee was instant – again, hidden in the cold cellar.

  Back at Langmeil, William and Joshua sat among the small group, waiting for their conductor Harry Rasch. There were only three more Saturdays before Farm Day, their annual celebration of cucumbers and cows, work-wear, boots and demonstrator tractors.

  As it generally always did, William’s and Joshua’s conversation drifted onto the North Koreans and the 38th Parallel, which could only lead to China and the bomb. William excitedly broke the news of Maralinga and Emu Plains, but Joshua already knew. ‘I’m keeping a scrapbook,’ William explained. ‘I’m gathering documentary evidence.’

  ‘Of what?’ Joshua asked.

  ‘Clues … God speaks through the papers too, Joshua.’

  Joshua Heinz thought about this and replied, ‘Where is it written in the Bible, that this would be the time?’

  William had to stop to think. ‘Revelations.’

  ‘Yes?’

  But then realised he couldn’t link it to the Bible, yet.

  ‘The thing is,’ Joshua continued, ‘people have been looking for clues, and finding them, for two thousand years.’

  William lit up, remembering a pasted article. ‘What about Lake Eyre? First time it’s flooded since white man.’

  Joshua shrugged. ‘William, there’s always something going on: a bushfire, a flood …’

  William stared at the calluses on his hands and wondered whether he didn’t have some work to do yet. ‘I’ll find it, and I’ll show you,’ he whispered.

  ‘He’s overdue,’ Joshua agreed, consolingly, ‘but if you’re not careful people will laugh at you.’

  ‘Who would?’ Ron Rohwer asked, settling in behind them. Josh turned to him. ‘Hello, Ron, we were just wondering – ’ ‘When he’s ready,’ Ron smiled, moving his stare across to William. ‘Wilhelm, you been reading the stars again?’

  ‘Who’ll be beside his throne?’ William asked bluntly, refusing to have this conversation with Ron again.

  ‘We all will. It’s not helpful, Wilhelm.’

  William stopped short, biting his tongue, shelving his lecture about Artaxerxes and the winepress of God’s furious anger and his embryonic ideas about the ‘prophetic period’ as it related to Christ’s ministry. Bluma had warned him off Ron Rohwer, seeing how Ron was an Elder at Langmeil, holding considerable sway within the congregation. Joshua was right, he had to have more than a few old clippings. He needed dates and facts as they were laid down in the Bible. Joshua was right also, of course, in saying many had misread the signs of their own time – describing the Egyptian village which, in 1912, stuffed and took to worshipping a dog that had been killed by a meteorite – but William had a gut feeling that he was right.

  Harry Rasch arrived and produced his baton from a velvet-lined case. Soon they were set upon a song of praise which they would sing beside more gentle folk tunes.

  Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work and defend thee, Surely his goodness and mercy shall attend thee …

  As William used his ear to find harmony and fit his voice within the layers of song, all he could hear was the slightly flat bass of Rohwer in his ear, droning, threatening to upset the balance. He could imagine himself turning and shouting, ‘Shut up!’ but again could only hear Bluma warning him off.

  Bluma stoked the fire of her black kitchen as the ladies’ fingers darted over faultless seams the Big Store could only dream about.

  ‘“Ponder anew, What the Almighty can do …”’ they sang, in harmonies less figured but just as lusty in their delivery.

  Nathan Miller sat in the raised loft above the living-room which was his bedroom. He heard the women’s melody but substituted his own words. ‘“Praise the Lord, the Almighty King of Pricks, under the table, with a dozen lopped dicks … ”’

  Chapter Two

  William stood in front of Langmeil with his hands behind his back, bobbing rhythmically to the song of a bar-tailed godwit in the candle pines. He read from the notice-board as the spirit of Kavel, Lutheran pioneer, drifted in fitful gusts from the cemetery.

  Sunday School, 9.45, Herb Medlin and the older children will lead using the theme ‘Ascension of Jesus’ based on Acts 1: 6–11. Mrs Fox will provide the music.

  As they waited for the rostered usher, Ian Doms, to open the church doors, Bluma picked dead-heads off roses and Nathan sat on the steps crushing soursobs between his fingers. William looked at him – ‘Nathan …’ – and went on to survey a range of notices, from next week’s quilting through to the sale of a washer with motorised wringer, near new, all offers over thirty pounds considered.

  The bells started ringing and William, recognising Bruno’s erratic style, knocked on the doors. ‘Bruno, open up.’ Ian arrived with his keys and started working on the cast-iron lock which hardly ever opened from the outside. ‘Here, give me a go,’ William demanded, but Ian was already halfway around to the back door.

  The Millers stood before the locked doors silently as the bells stopped and William heard the voices of Bruno and Ian chatting. He fancied he could hear them laughing. ‘Bruno, Ian,’ William called, knocking even louder, but the laughing just started again. William shook his head and made his way around the back.

  Bluma stepped towards the notices and admired a poster of Victor Mature and Susan Heywood in Demetrius and the Gladiators. ‘Unlike Pastor Henry,’ she whispered to her son.

  ‘It’s a charity event,’ he replied, glowing with visions of Christian-full lions parading before the Emperor with contented grins.

  As the bells started again the Tanunda Lutheran faithful closed doors on warm cottages and made their way along stree
ts of arum and belladonna lilies, under date palms heavy with fruit and past half-empty churches of every other denomination. William believed that the Catholic church, built in the 1890s, still stood for everything unreformed and unrefined, Father Pallhuber celebrating mass on behalf of dour, corpulent popes with a hankering for gold and choir boys. The Methodists had come to Tanunda too, in the form of a dozen or so Wesleyans with a seeder and combine. Their wheat purchased a plot and built a church on Irvine Street, away from the real business of a German god brandishing mettwurst and thunderbolts. The descendants of the twelve still made their way to Irvine Street every Sunday but they were the religious white trash of the valley.

  Arthur Blessitt, out inspecting trial plots of strelitzia and Geraldton wax, heard the Langmeil bells, stood up, adjusted his tie and headed off towards town. Stopping in at Mr Wilmhurst’s, Tanunda’s gout-stricken blacksmith, he dropped off a pot of raw beef tea which he promised would have him up and about in no time. Passing the Savings Bank and Turner’s dress shop, he turned into Langmeil’s avenue of candle pines and crossed himself, overcome by a spirit stronger than an ocean of chamomile or reservoirs of barley water. ‘“Our help is in the name of the Lord,”’ he whispered, making his way towards the steps, where Bruno Hermann shook his hand and handed him the order of service and hymnal, asking about the progress of his grandson’s pillow box. ‘One more week, Bruno, I promise. I was sold green wood. I refuse to work with green wood.’

  Meanwhile, Joshua Heinz pulled the youngest of his six children off Menge’s spotlights, a pair of Electricity Trust surplus spots rigged up in an enclosed bunker no one had bothered to fill in since the war. Anton Menge, trying to prove his, and his town’s, loyalty during the Second World War, had painted the lights with crude Union Jacks held by an emu and kangaroo, in anticipation of stukas and dorniers on the horizon. Joshua stood behind his children and clapped his hands twice, saying, ‘Walk on,’ and smiling at Catherine, his wife. His children continued single file, along the road, up the avenue of pines and into the church.