Hill of Grace (11 page)

‘“It is not for you to know the times or seasons,”' Henry said, ‘“which the Father have put in His power.”' Going on to explain how they still knew when to pick grapes, when the leaves of the myrtle would turn, when the winter reached its equinox and the summer its most searing. ‘I mean, we're not entirely stupid,' he concluded. ‘Still, it's a big ask, William.'

Doctor Hamilton couldn't believe his ears. From
The Overlanders
to the Amish. More Fritz than the Chapman's factory, and a group discount too. Still, they'd paid. Goebbels was dead and part of being an Aussie was to take people as you found them.

‘So,' Ron continued, ‘you, William Miller, above all other men, know the exact year, month and day?'

‘Kookaburras,' Doctor Hamilton whispered, as he pointed.

‘According to the Jewish calendar,' William replied, ‘it would be March twenty-one.'

‘Nineteen fifty-two?'

‘I believe.'

‘What do you make of that, Pastor Henry?'

Henry stopped in his tracks, a confused Moses leading his tribe towards emus. The others stopped and looked at him. Even Doctor Hamilton stopped.

‘As dry as a nun's nasty? Is that correct?'

Doctor Hamilton smiled, but everyone else was shocked.

Henry sighed. ‘Well, at least that's
one
thing I know.' And smiled, walking on, taking the lead from Doctor Hamilton.

As they continued on through denuded scrub, overgrown with potato weed and horehound, Ron Rohwer took William aside and said, ‘Just because someone exploded a bomb, doesn't mean the world's going to end. Every time's had its bomb.'

William was silent.

‘There'll be a sign.'

‘What sign?' William barked.

‘Churches with Christ's face in the plaster.'

‘Rubbish. Signs for idiots. Haven't come to nothing . . . anything.' Whereas William's path had been logical, mathematical, as well thought-out and balanced as an algebraic equation. He continued on without looking at Ron. ‘We're all entitled to our own views, Ron.'

‘Not to brainwash others, though.'

‘Brainwash!'

Ron stopped but the others kept moving. ‘“No man knows,”' he whispered to himself, seeking higher consolation than Pastor Henry, who was caught up in a vision of someone harvesting their pubic hairs.

They were marched past an enclosure containing three lame wallabies that had been orphaned by a Holden. ‘My daughter nurses them,' Hamilton said. ‘When she's not busy in the ticket booth.' The Doctor explained how a Chinese panda, sitting motionless in a grassy enclosure, would be dead had Dinkum World not purchased it from the Chinese government when some zoo or other was about to close.

The pentothal narrowly avoided, thought William.

But suffering a sadder, slower form of euthanasia, as lorikeets and galahs from an adjacent aviary mimicked the sounds of his apocalypse.

The social committee settled in for their free sausage sizzle and the Doctor encouraged them to carve their names into a roughly hewn outdoor setting. ‘Carved by our neighbour,' Hamilton said. ‘A Yid, but by far the nicest Red Sea pedestrian I've ever met.'

Eventually it was time for a group photo. The Doctor stood beside William, smiled and said, ‘Meine freundes, ha?'

William looked at his watch and sighed once again.

William lay in long grass in the late afternoon, watching drops of water trail down split tomatoes he'd told Bluma she never should have planted. Dusted regularly, but dying anyway. Turning a winter yellow of everything gone weedy, setting seed in a garden no one would bother about until spring.

He looked up, but then closed his eyes, his ears alert to distant trucks and sheep, a breeze through stray, wild oats. A Cessna over the High Eden Ridge transformed into the stukas of a nearly forgotten World War Two newsreel, screened for the town's benefit during the war in the Tanunda Institute. Then, days later, there were the trucks full of new street signs: overnight Bethanien became Bethany, and the Kaiserstuhl, Mount Kitchener. Pastor Henry had been ordered to pray in English and the Holy Cross and Gnadenberg churches were told to paint over their portraits of Luther, depictions of Prussian villages and narratives with decorative script, and to remove five statues of Jeremiah, Moses, St Peter, St Paul and Jesus, which were handed over to the Anglicans.

William was looking for a Wettebaum, a ‘weather tree' that formed itself in the shape of a conifer in the high cloud formations which had made their way over from the west. The Wettebaum, it was said, would forecast the arrival of rain three days later. Another story said that if it rained on the twenty-seventh of June (three days time) then it would rain for the following seven weeks straight.

William had made out a Model T Ford, the face of Billy Hughes and even an olive tree. Close but not close enough. Mostly the clouds refused to solidify into shapes-as-signs, giving no indication of things to come, such as the council mowing of verges which always preceded their rates notice.

Bruno Hermann had always ridiculed William for his old-fashioned beliefs, but each time it had rained on the twenty-seventh it had just kept raining. Sometimes on and off, but without fail, for seven weeks, give or take a few days
(And no, it's not just the normal
course of winter, Bruno)
. On June twenty-four last year, as he was lying in this exact same spot, Bruno had come over to the fence and said, ‘Look up there, William, it's a pencil pine . . . or is it an Aleppo?'

Laughing. But William's eyes had stayed focused and he'd found one. Calling back to Bruno, busy on the throne, ‘Look, perfectly formed,' not bending or warping as it made its way across the sky. ‘I have to see this,' Bruno had said as he emerged, fighting with half a dozen buttons, to see William pointing at a giant pine tree stretched out across a blue canvas.

‘Doesn't mean anything,' Bruno had muttered, but three days later William saw Bruno at his window, peering out at a sky full of dark clouds. William, vindicated, was doing the same, explaining to Bluma how Bruno had lost touch with his past.

But sometimes faith wasn't enough. The clouds had passed on without shedding a drop and that evening Bruno was at William's back door, explaining how the Siebenschlafer made about as much sense as life without electricity or gas. Still, he explained, we make worlds in our own heads and live in them, if that's what you want.

Bruno wasn't troubled with technology. Crushers the size of B-17s, aerial spraying? No problem. ‘Luther himself was a reformer,' he'd told William. Nailing notices to church doors.
21.
My Kelvinator tractor is a rare and beautiful thing. 22. God would have us
fill the bellies of starving kiddies, regardless of the means.

And this is what William heard, laying in the grass in search of cumulus pine. Bruno on his Kelvinator tractor, emerging from his shed with Ian Doms' boom spray in tow.

He refused to sit up or open his eyes, or let Bruno spoil his day. He continued scanning the skies hopefully, picking up a viburnum-scented breeze from the Tanunda Road. And when Bruno engaged his P.T.O. and the air pump started charging the tanks, William lay back and thought of better ways of doing things: of neighbours (
real
neighbours) who used to help out with the hand-sowing, harvesting and stooking, and who would look after your children and share their extra lemons. Of preserving your own pears, avoiding tin cans leaching God-knows-what, and re-tiling your own roof.

Bruno opened the arms of the boom and re-mounted his tractor; opening the nozzles he engaged high range and started making passes through a paddock of Salvation Jane which he'd let go for too long. William had complained but it was too late now, the weed having set and dropped its seed. Up and forth, William trying to remain focused on the sky. Until a cloud of poison drifted over and settled on his face.

Spitting it out he sat up and wiped himself. He stood up and went over to the fence, waving at Bruno. Bruno left his tractor idling and came over to him. ‘William, what were you doing in the grass?'

‘What do you think?' Spitting. ‘What are you using?'

‘Glyphosate.'

From a brand new drum, purchased with his sheep dip and a bag of linseed meal for his broilers; bagged and delivered to the back of his ute by the new boy at Bennett and Fisher's. ‘Say hi to Lilli for me, Mr Hermann.'

‘How do you know Lilli?'

‘We did maths together.'

‘Oh.'

As Bruno's tractor chugged he leaned on a fence post and spoke quietly. ‘How was I to know, William?'

‘Look at the breeze, Bruno. People have washing out. That went straight onto our vegetables.'

‘Can't hurt 'em.'

‘The point is – ' ‘Alright, I'm sorry. Just the same, don't see snakes lying in long grass.' Bruno was tempted to tell William about Bluma, secretly dusting his cabbages and tomatoes when he was off at kegel or choir. Instead he took a deep breath and tried to keep the peace.

‘Think you'll get your rain this year?'

‘Have to wash these clothes.'

As if glyphosate was some mortal sin in liquid form.

‘William –'

‘People farmed a long time without – '

‘You got shit on the liver.'

William stepped forward, indignant. ‘I haven't got – ' ‘It's this business with Lilli, isn't it? She tells me it was your Nathan took her up there.'

‘I'm talking about poison.'

‘No you're not. This is because things haven't ended up like you wanted.'

‘Pesticides stay in the body.'

‘Lilli's got spirit, but she isn't what you think.'

‘Which is?'

‘A tramp.'

‘It's Nathan's choice.'

Bruno's Kelvinator chugged uneasily and stopped. He looked around and back at William. ‘I suppose that's a sign.'

‘You're superstitious.'

Bruno smiled, folded his arms and thought about Bluma with her hand-crocheted covers that she pulled over mirrors during thunder storms to stop the collection and deflection of God's anger down hallways and through bedrooms, up into Nathan's sleeping loft and down into their cold cellar. ‘Anyway, I gotta finish this,' he said, turning and walking off. ‘All the best to Nathan for his new job.'

William stormed into the wash-house, slamming the door and sitting fully clothed. He knew where the problem was. It was Bruno's son-in-law, Peter Fechner, forever busy in Adelaide, who had neglected his duties as a father, allowing Lilli to drift through life without so much as a thought for the essentials: God, family, school. Allowing her to turn from a valuable member of their community into someone who didn't care. A child of her age, more than willing to infect others with the plague of apathy. Infecting Nathan whenever he was around her. Until he succumbed, Julius writing it up in his reddest ink:
Nathan lost his
focus
. Just as much on God as Biology, or so William believed. And so he wanted to tell Bruno.

In the end it was best to show some discretion, lest things degenerate into a soap opera of carefully scripted replies, which ultimately led nowhere.

He pulled off his clothes and soaked them in the trough, taking washing powder from the cupboard and pouring it in by the handful. Then he filled a bucket with cold water and tipped it over his head, again and again, until he was shivering and his penis had shrunk to the width of a carpenter's pencil. Finally he set to his clothes, scrubbing, rinsing and draining. Again and again, until his hands were red and numb.

And then he opened the door and called out at the top of his voice, ‘Bluma!'

‘Yes?' Emerging with a scone cutter.

‘Bring me some clothes.'

That night William left early for kegel, minus the Wettebaum which he'd probably missed as it dispersed across a pasture of blue sky thanks to Bruno's stubbornness.

Bluma helped Nathan pack his duffle bag: work boots and T-shirts, hankies and freshly ironed underwear; a Bible, which he promised he'd return to from time to time; and a jar of pickled dill cucumbers for his host.

‘Help with the washing up, leave the toilet lid down and don't talk politics.'

‘Or religion?'

‘Unless it's the Bible. They may be Methody.'

Bluma was trying to finish some white-work, improvising with a needle too big by half. This time,
Schlafen Sie Wohl
, for Nathan's hosts to hang above their bed. Nathan was reading what remained of William's newspaper when there was a knock at the door, followed by a head, and Lilli bearing a gift.

‘Mrs Miller, how are you?' Kissing his mother on both cheeks like some impudent Frenchy.

‘Fine. And your mum?'

But Lilli just smiled and handed Nathan the gift. ‘For those long nights when you haven't got me around.'

Nathan looked at Bluma. Unable to explain what this girl was doing in their home, he shrugged and unwrapped the present.
The Golden Age of Steam.
‘Thank you. Just in case I haven't had enough during the day.'

‘Just in case,' she smiled.

Nathan was confused, but he already knew that with Lilli what you saw wasn't necessarily what you got. Lilli was coming to resemble some barely believable creation from a radio soap. While Lilli sat and talked with Bluma, promising his mother free cake if she came in when it was quiet, Nathan tried to read her motives. Then he wondered if he wasn't becoming like his father, analysing agendas where there were none, sealing his observations away inside a glass brick wall where they could be seen but not changed.

Walking her home later that night he said, ‘I can't win with you.'

‘Do you know what that book cost me?'

‘What?'

‘Nothing . . . it was my Dad's.'

They stopped inside the ruins of an old cottage and sat on rubble. ‘Will you miss me?' he asked.