Hill of Grace (16 page)

Waiting outside Langmeil on Sunday morning (William busy inside with the bells, trying to teach Bluma some rhythm, ‘Now, no . . . now . . .') Nathan grabbed Lilli before anyone noticed and dragged her into the church hall. ‘It's my turn for Sunday School.'

They switched on lights in the vestry, lit heaters and sat down beneath a framed photograph of Pastor Hoffmann. Lilli smiled, crossing her hands in her lap, laying aside a dog-eared copy of
Lady Chatterly's Lover
and asking, ‘So?'

Soon they'd come up with an idea. As she started scribbling messages on note-paper, Nathan wrapped them in endless layers around a presentation Bible. ‘The Drummonds,' he began, ‘are very different from the Mullers.'

Continuing with a description of Rose in her kitchen, Bob at work on his wheelchairs and Phil in the Barr Smith dunnies, copying thoughts at least as profound as Lilli's pass-the-parcel notes:
Jesus walks beside you . . . he's the one with the sandals and food in
his beard . . .
Eventually she looked at him directly and asked, ‘So why did you stay down? You oughta seen your dad last Sunday.'

Nathan shrugged. ‘I don't care. Honestly. You could always come down, although I don't think they'd put you up.'

‘I have some other friends, from school. One's at secretarial college, the other at uni.' She thought, yes, I'm still here, filling pasties with scoops of mixed vegetable, mixing topping for donuts and sprinkling hundreds-and-thousands on buns – slicing bread, endlessly, and ringing up sales from one end of the day to the next.

‘Maybe I should stay,' she said. ‘I love smiling at ugly babies and making small talk with drongos. Still, there's worse I suppose . . .' As she thought of the options: sewing up bags at the flour mill, bottling wine, putting blue rinses through hair the colour of talc.

Nathan read her notes and smiled. ‘If these kids blab, we'll get in trouble.'

‘I don't care,' she mimicked, leaning forward and kissing him.

He pulled himself off. ‘I have to think of Jerusalem.'

Taken by an idea, she smiled and started writing.
Mary
Magdalene. My place or yours. Cheep. A wandering messiah and three
children to support.

William's head poked in the room. ‘Nearly ready, Nathan?'

Lilli sat up. ‘It's going to be quite a party, Mr Miller.'

William stared at her. ‘Maybe Nathan would be better off running things.'

‘I'm the hostess,' she replied, cocking her head, straightening her dress and returning her hands to her lap.

William closed the door and she grabbed the pen.
Alternatives
to Christianity: Buddhism, Islam, Hindu, Pagan (fun, boiling mushrooms
in cast-iron pots).
She sat back and shared her week with Nathan. The Lawrence she'd found in the Tanunda Public Library, sitting abandoned in the Contemporary Fiction beside Patrick White's
The Aunt's Story
. She read him some extracts, underlined in hot, red biro, nowhere near as saucy as rumoured, falling well short of the
Advertiser
personals. ‘See, Lawrence just skirts around it,' she explained. ‘A bum to him is all marbled flesh, the schlong,
an
instrument of love
. . .
heaving breasts glow translucently in the moonlight
. . .'

She looked at him and laughed. He lowered his head and muttered, ‘Jerusalem,' and she threw the book at him. Standing up, she selected
The Secret of St John Bosco
from a bookcase, and started drawing over the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and a priest named Don Cagliero, adding beards and moustaches, horns and elephantine cocks which passed from one page to the next. Nathan tried to grab it off her but she climbed to the ledge of a high window and sat in dust an inch thick. Scribbling. Smiling. Looking down at him and lifting her eyebrows as if to say, What y' gonna do about it?

William appeared at the door again. ‘Pastor Henry's starting.

Do you want to come and get the children?'

‘Do we what!' Lilli replied, jumping down from her ledge.

Mrs Fox entered the vestry, cradling a pile of children's hymns in her arms. Lilli brushed past and said, ‘We shan't need those,' walking out to make her announcement in the church proper.

The Langmeil bells fell quiet and pews creaked beneath the weight of a full house. Arthur Blessitt sat beside William, and beside Arthur, Joshua and Seymour. ‘Join me today,' William had said, and since he was back in his spot in the front row, no one argued.

Arthur shifted his weight around to test some repairs he'd made: a full Tuesday afternoon, upturned pews and glue and nails and Pastor Henry fixing him coffee as he worked.

‘William has finished his harvest?' Henry had asked.

‘Yes.'

‘This year he seems, preoccupied.'

‘He has his dates. We've decided that it's inevitable.'

‘He has.'

‘We have.'

Henry rearranged a collection of Arthur's lisianthus on the altar. ‘The thing is, if William's wrong, he stands to look silly.'

‘Christ isn't coming unless we want it hard enough. That's what William says. Fixing pews is one thing, but there has to be an end to it.'

‘You know what the Bible says about that.'

‘Just the same.'

Henry had left him with his hand-drill and cold chicken sandwich, and retreated back into the vestry.

Henry looked out across the congregation. William's face was blank. Henry had no idea how many people William had got to. Joshua and Seymour probably, both prone to a bit of wand-waving and fireworks. Joshua had gone through an astrology phase, guided to horoscopes and star charts by a new stenographer in his office. For a while he carried around a satchel with maps, books and tables of dates, pulling them out at the slightest suggestion to check the best day for William to start harvesting or Arthur to pot up his carnations. It was a rhythm of nature which God had set in motion, he claimed, but no one was convinced. Henry visited to talk to him, to discuss the concerns of his friends. ‘Who, which friends?' Joshua had asked.

Eventually he came to his senses, brought down to earth by Harry Powter, his boss, who didn't accept ‘the stars' as a reason for missing three days work. ‘Something terrible could've happened,' Joshua said, as Harry explained how it already had for the stenographer, newly replaced by his sixteen-year-old niece.

Henry looked about for the support of Gunther, Ron and Trevor and the others but guessed he was all alone, preaching a Jesus firmly stuck in his sphere.

Back in the hall, Mrs Fox started playing and singing, ‘“Jesus, friend of little children, be a friend to me . . .”'

Lilli, sitting in the middle of a ring of children, stood up and began talking over the music. ‘Mrs Fox, Nathan and I were given the responsibility of organising today's devotion.'

Mrs Fox stopped but didn't move her eyes from the sheet music. ‘It's standard practice to have a children's hymn.'

‘Stand up children, musical chairs. Mrs Fox, do you know a tango, a foxtrot?'

Meanwhile, Henry worked his way through a standard mass, watching how William refused to drop any coins in the offering. The congregation stood as the offering was presented to the altar, all except William, who sat with his arms crossed, smiling. Bluma looked over and knew what was coming. During the offertory, Arthur bowed his head, burning Henry's words into the wood of his cross:
What shall I render to the Lord, For all his bounty to me?
William was unfazed, watching how Henry kept looking down at him.

In the hall, Mrs Fox was doing her best to improvise a dance tune from
Gott ein Vater
, stopping on Lilli's cue. One of Lilli's cousins lost her chair and started crying. ‘Don't be a sook,' Lilli said, dismissing her with a twist of the ear. Mrs Fox turned around. ‘Lilli . . . is there a point to this?'

Lilli smiled. ‘Survival of the fittest.' Raising her eyebrows.

‘I mean, how is this a devotion?'

‘For goodness sake. Alright children, as you've been taught:

“Our Father, who art in Heaven . . .”'

Mrs Fox bowed her head and joined in but as Lilli's speed became supersonic she looked up again. ‘Are we finished here?'

‘No, the fun is just beginning.'

Lilli produced a box of donkey's tails cut out of butcher's paper, and removed a half-sized portrait of St Sebastian from the wall. ‘Pin the tail on the martyr. Who's first?'

The children eagerly lined up, even though there was no prize on offer, leaving tails on shins and elbows and ear lobes. Halfway through, Mrs Fox gathered her music, closed the piano and left.

Climbing awkwardly past legs and over bags she reached Bluma, sat down and whispered, ‘That Fechner girl is causing trouble.'

Bluma looked over at William but there was no point worrying about it now.

Back in the hall, Lilli got the children in a circle and said, ‘When the Schoenberg stops, take off a layer and read out the message.' She began banging away on Mrs Fox's piano, picking random notes and clusters and narrating ad lib sprechstimme. ‘Round and round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows.'

The first child unwrapped the present and read out his message: ‘“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna . . .”' Lilli encouraged the group to join in, ‘“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna . . .”' She returned to the piano with gusto, using her forearm percussively to explore new sounds.

Back in the church Henry looked up, smiling, ‘Sounds like a different sort of devotion.'

But William didn't smile, choosing his moment, clutching his speech in his sweaty hand and finally standing up. He cleared his throat. ‘I have something to read to you.'

Henry looked down at him. ‘William.'

‘It'll only take a moment.'

‘Wait for the benediction.' The pastor looked around for the support of the Elders but they were willing to sit back and let things take their course. After William had dug a big enough hole, they'd just have to fill it in. Henry sighed. ‘Go ahead, William.'

‘I, and a few friends of like mind' – he indicated the length of his pew, unclear of where his following stopped.

One of the Linkes, sitting towards the end, said, ‘Who?'

‘Mr Blessitt, Mr Heinz and Mr Hicks.'

Mo, Larry and Curly, not disputing William, but hardly vocal in their support. ‘We have come to an understanding of things as they stand. Of how the present business of the world is about to be wound up.'

Silence. ‘This is best left for some other time,' demanded a voice from the back of the church. ‘Who agrees?'

Mixed responses, but then another voice. ‘Let him finish.'

William flattened his speech against his chest, held it up and started reading. The slight trembling of the paper was almost audible above the silence, which was disturbed only by the clatter of improvised Schoenberg through a thick, plaster wall.

‘I, William Miller, again to be known as Wilhelm Muller, have read and studied the Scriptures for some years now. The figuring of dates is not as important as some suggest. Nevertheless, if you take the trouble to ask, I'll explain . . .'

On and on, explaining how he'd decided to leave the congregation – to hushed sighs of relief – and continue his worship from home. How anybody who'd like to join him was welcome. How, on the twenty-first of March next year, Jesus would return to earth via the Muller home, and various other places, gathering disciples to sit beside him in his thousand-year reign on earth. How he, Wilhelm Muller, wasn't here to judge anyone, except that the signs were there, and Jesus would ask about such matters as faith, unlikely to let things ride with the equivalent of a library fine. How the ‘abominations of desolation' could be known by all those who wanted to understand and be ready for His coming. ‘I am fully convinced that on March twenty-one next, according to the Jewish mode of computation of time, Christ will come and bring all his saints with him, and then that He shall reward every man as his work shall be.'

Silence. Henry looked at him. ‘You finished, William?'

‘Wilhelm.'

Lilli's cousin emerged from the hall, screaming and crying, pointing back and saying, ‘Jesus' wife made babies for money.'

She found her mother and collapsed into her lap as everyone looked back at William. He left his speech on Henry's pulpit, walking out of the church, down the avenue of pencil pines, never to return. Bluma followed close behind, tripping over legs and apologising as a hundred or so voices passed sentence. The children drifted back into the church and Henry finished his benediction. Lilli and Nathan exited via the rear of the hall, damage done, Lilli with the copy of Don Bosco she was going to finish illustrating for him.

Later that morning, Henry stacked the chairs in the hall as St Sebastian, pock-marked with red and yellow plasticine, smiled down on him. The scribbled notes scattered on the floor spoke of a day when even the sun was unsure of its trajectory, burning through high cloud and laying itself across the cold ground of the Eden Valley. Seymour Hicks appeared behind him and said, ‘Pastor Henry . . .'

Henry used his foot to crush a bin full of butcher's paper. ‘Seymour . . .' Pausing. ‘You looked very uncomfortable.'

‘We didn't know what he was up to.' Seeing how they were really just props for a highly polished performance.

‘Don't worry, Seymour, no one's judging you,' Henry whispered.

‘We didn't think he'd . . .' Wondering if Henry thought he was hedging bets. ‘I'm on the door next Sunday.'

‘Very good.'

‘Henry . . .'

‘What's done is done. To me, Seymour, faith's not a matter of dates.'

‘He's explained it . . .'

‘I know . . .' Thinking of St Rita, the patroness of Impossible Causes, who longed to suffer like Jesus, pleading until she was struck by a thorn from a crucifix, the wound turning septic and killing her. Like William, wishing too hard for the wrong thing.