Hill of Grace (28 page)

Pastor Flint quietened the crowd to say his last few words. ‘We don't seek to rob the Aranda of their culture. They can use their own ways to praise God. I have left some paintings with Pastor Henry, traditional pieces . . .'

So many red and yellow and black dots coming together to form a vision of God. Ochre crosses receding into a background of blurred meaning, snakes and earth serpents diluted, as if by metho, into a wash of colour and formlessness.

The ladies were left to do their thing: ‘“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord . . .”' Stamping their feet on the concrete and following each other in a circle like so many elephants trunk to tail. Clanging their rhythm sticks and droning in the best Langmeil tradition, moving onto the spokesman in her own solo, ‘“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me . . .”'

But that was it. There was pickled pig and fresh lamb to be sold. The ladies were led back towards Langmeil in a line, not talking, tripping on kerbs and gutters. Arriving back at the rectory they changed into cotton dresses of their own making and squeezed into Pastor Flint's bus for the trip to McLaren Vale.

Nathan pursued his father. ‘This is because of Lilli.'

‘Partly.' Going on to explain how it was a little like killing a pig. You had to know where to cut, how to turn the knife and later, how to skin it and remove the blood and organs so nothing was wasted. And the meat itself. Preparing and salting the right cuts in the right order. ‘Maybe, Nathan, another twelve months.'

‘Twelve months?' He looked at his mother and she looked at William.

‘William, are you saying Nathan should leave his job?'

William had started tasting cheeses. ‘It's up to them, but if they're asking me . . .' He shrugged.

Nathan stood staring at him as he kept walking. Bluma took his hand. ‘It's just your father's dramatics. He'll sign.'

Nathan turned and ran off towards Murray Street. They didn't see him again until nine o'clock that night, when he walked in the back door, opened the door of his father's study and stepped inside. ‘What have you heard about Lilli?'

William refused to look up from his book. ‘Not as much as I think you think.'

‘I've scored top marks for all my tests. Tomorrow you can come with me and we'll call Bob, Mr Drummond. He'll tell you how I've been working.'

‘Nathan, I'm not stopping you.'

That's exactly what you're doing, Nathan thought. He stared at the bald patch on the top of his father's head. The old bastard was playing with words again, saying one thing but meaning another, trying to make everyone do what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted.

‘I've done everything at home,' he continued.

‘I know you have.'

‘The weekends I missed I was busy.'

No reply. Bluma appeared behind Nathan. ‘William, just sign the papers.'

No reply. Nathan stepped forward. ‘If you stop me in this, there are other things.'

William slammed his book shut and stood up. ‘I won't be threatened.'

It was enough for Nathan. As his mother clawed at his arm he packed his clothes in his duffle bag. ‘I'll spend the rest of my holiday with the Drummonds.'

‘And next weekend?'

After a few hours in the Langbein grandstand, watching a pair of foxes sniffing out a dead tabby in the Tanunda Titans change room, Nathan wandered along Murray Street, down an alleyway beside Wohler's furniture shop and through an unlocked window.

Making a coffee in the tea-room he set up a gramophone beside a locally made divan and slipped in between factory fresh flannelette sheets: Bach's
Brandenburg Concerto Number 3
was enough to send him off. The record finished and the stylus clicked over as the turn-table turned and Nathan dreamt Axminster dreams of steam and copper piping and the squeal of stuck pigs.

The next morning he woke with a hand on his shoulder and one of the Wohler sons standing beside a policeman. ‘You Miller's son?' the senior constable asked, and Nathan shook his head. The policeman and Wohler's son retreated into an office. Nathan sat up, pulling on his shoes and sneering at a couple of girls from his old school who were staring in the front window with their noses squashed flat.

‘We'd only be making his problems worse,' the constable said, staring out at Nathan, reminding Wohler of the pamphlets and all of the business in the
Oracle
. ‘He's not a bad kid. I say we don't drag the religious nut into it.'

Which is how Nathan ended up spending his morning loading deliveries. Just before lunch he was dismissed with a combination lecture-commiseration. At one o'clock he waited on the platform of Tanunda Station, watching Mr Fritschle pick weeds from between cracked tarmac. Looking up, the older man said, ‘You fix a fridge yet?'

He smiled. ‘Most things.'

‘Handy to have a fridge man around town. When you finish up you could set up here.' Gunther grinned, as if to say, Six years, don't you think the Railways would've known about Revelations?

After all, the Railways knew about everything: the man in blue, giving platform numbers and departure times which extended well beyond next March.

Nathan smiled back at him but didn't voice the thought they shared. Broadcasting it to Fritschle, and beyond, would be a final burning of bridges with his father. To disagree was one thing, argue another, but to go behind his back . . .

Just to be sure he sat at the opposite end of the carriage, avoiding eye contact and studying a Gravox ad. Coal smoke blew in the window and he felt assured, moving through a landscape of endings into one of beginnings. Fraction equivalents. Three eighths equals 0.375, a row of red ticks on a trade-school paper – even the smallest details were a consolation: a crack in the glass of the emergency stop, hastily repaired with electrical tape, a list of rules and their equivalent fines, foul language coming in above fare evasion.

Arriving at Islington he searched out Bob and explained his predicament. To Bob it was history repeating, more melodrama than
Blue Hills
, taking on problems of other people's making. Busy wrestling with a pipe bender he said, ‘You'll just have to sort it out with him . . .'

Nathan stood staring. ‘He won't change his mind.'

‘Well . . .'

‘Is there some way around it?'

Bob dropped the pipe. ‘I don't know, go see personnel.' But Nathan knew he meant, I don't care, it's not my problem, I have enough of my own. When Bob locked the pipe in the vice and started bending it again, Nathan turned and started to walk off.

But Bob just couldn't do it; next he'd be leaving nuts off of wheelchairs, returning them with broken spokes and treadless tyres. ‘Eh, strudel boy.'

Nathan stopped and looked back.

‘Give it a week or two.'

Nathan nodded his head. ‘He won't change his mind.'

‘Okay . . . you want me to talk to him?'

‘Arthur, next door, has a telephone.' He returned and put his hand on the pipe. ‘If you tell him the papers can't wait . . .' And shrugged.

‘Okay, now piss off, you're meant to be on holidays.'

Nathan walked home past cottage gardens in the first throes of spring. Tulips, freesias and lisianthus; coloured beds of dying sour-sobs and potato weed. Barely warm soil promised a regeneration of life for the folks of Kilburn, grown fat and pale and wheezy over a winter it seemed would never end. Unpicked lemons dropped from tree tops, hitting the earth with a thud, waking up leaf mites and ants drowsy with morning frost. The smell of jasmine blew over from a trellis around someone's water tank and shrivelled passionfruit hung heavy over broken, paling fences.

Rose, busy cutting recipes out of the
Weekly
and sticking them into a scrapbook, was so surprised to see him she knocked over a vase of white geraniums. Phil, giving up on a drug text, wondered aloud how anyone could've had enough of Tanunda. As Rose put on the kettle, Nathan started explaining himself, using Bruegel as a descriptor of lesser hells in which his father became the ogre of Goat Square. Ending up with an edited version of his argument with William and a description of the night at Wohler's.

‘So Dad says, Nathan, don't you think I've heard about this whore – sorry, Rose – this girl you've been going out with? And I say, What have you heard? And he says, She's the local . . .'

Rose looked at him and smiled. ‘“Bitch.”'

Phil covered his ears. ‘Mother.'

‘She's the local bitch,' Nathan continued, modulating his voice into tones of fire and brimstone.

‘Maybe you should introduce them,' Phil said, continuing an assignment.

‘I know,' Rose smiled, cutting outside the lines, ‘rumours multiply like bugs in a small town.'

‘Like bacteria, mother.'

‘Bugs.'

Phil ran his finger over the page of the text, smiling at Nathan.

‘Lithium. Just perfect for your dad.'

Rose turned the recipe over and started gluing. ‘Phillip, it's none of your concern.'

But he read anyway, grinning, ‘“Taken to treat and prevent mood swings, either up or down, mania or depression . . .”' Continuing until he found something to support his argument, reading it slowly and loudly, ‘“People with manias are liable to destroy relationships and jobs in bouts which may last for weeks, followed by even longer periods of depression. They may be talkative, sleepless, irritable, egocentric and
prone to flights of fantasy
. . .”' He looked up at both of them, ‘I could arrange for some.' Checking. ‘“Dosage: slow release tablets . . .”'

Rose didn't look up from a diagram of a whiting skeleton.

‘Phillip, would you talk about your own father that way?'

‘If he started a cult.'

‘Phillip, people disagree on things, doesn't mean they want to do each other in.'

Phil couldn't see the problem. ‘It's an option.'

‘Nathan might be angry, but I'm sure he doesn't hate his father, do you, Nathan?'

Nathan looked back at Phil and smiled, ‘. . . no.'

In her head Rose was filleting, a skill she'd never properly developed. Taking a knife she opened the flesh down the spine and started removing bones. No matter how hard you tried you'd still miss some and Bob would just about choke, coughing and spluttering and gurgling cold tea as he recovered from another brush with death.

‘If my dad doesn't sign,' Nathan continued, ‘I
will
hate him. He can see it's something I want to do. If you do that to a person they'll never forget.'

‘Oh, you'd be surprised,' Rose said, searching the fillet for stray bones. ‘After the first war they said it'd never happen again. Lessons had been learnt. Then came the League of Nations. Then came Hitler. So . . .'

Phil looked up. ‘What's Hitler got to do with an apprenticeship with the Railways?'

Rose sighed, obsessed with a single bone, somewhere, that she'd missed. Realising that humans never quite got it right, fussing over things which probably didn't matter anyway.

‘I think hate could be the word,' Nathan concluded, ‘if it came down to it.'

Rose started to feel the weight of other people's problems – this time, not things she could leave behind in the Coronary and Surgical wards. It could have been worse. Nathan was a good kid, but when they took him on they took on his father. There were some things the extra money couldn't cover, like the stress from so many
Weekly
sagas made real.

The sun tumbled in the window, settling across a lace tablecloth full of bread crumbs and gravy stains. Rose found the recipe for an Asian soup and started clipping. Chances were that Bob, with his pockets eternally full of antacid tablets, wouldn't let it past his lips, but at least now it was three onto one. And anyway, she guessed, if he played up, there were still cans of chicken noodle dating back to before the war.

Phil's eyes lit up again and he looked at Nathan. ‘I think this is what you're after.' Reading. ‘“Pentobarbitone. Barbiturate sedative used to relieve anxiety and promote sleep . . .”'

He looked at Nathan again and lifted his eyebrows. ‘This is the good bit. “Accidental overdoses are common and characterised by a loss of consciousness, shallow breathing, weak pulse and low blood pressure. Shock and kidney failure follow . . .”'

‘Phillip.' Rose looked up, brandishing a stick of glue.

After tea Rose washed the dishes and settled in at the phone table with her best friend Lorna. Lorna had introduced her to the League of Health and Beauty, Prospect branch, a group formed by and for the betterment of Christian women in their ‘post-motherhood phase'. Rose was telling Lorna how much she'd enjoyed their eurhythmics on the floor of the Presbyterian church hall. Stripped down to their black satin briefs and undershirts they'd moved their bodies about like ‘wild flamingos in a dying frenzy' (Rose's words), combining ballet and gym in previously untried combinations.

‘Is it every Wednesday?' Rose asked, as Nathan listened impatiently from the lounge. It was nearly nine before he brought it up again, looking at Bob and saying, ‘Do you want me to speak to my father first?'

Bob stood up and took the phone from his wife. ‘She'll call you back, Lorna, I've got a business call.'

Arthur stood on the porch of the Miller house shaking off rain, which was coming down torrentially, and scraping mud from the soles of his slippers. He knocked and Bluma told him William was riding Shanks' pony.

‘Who is Shanks?'

‘The toilet, Arthur.' Smiling.

Arthur tightened the cord on his dressing-gown and sprinted down the side of the house. Knocking on the toilet door he called over the rain, ‘William, a phone call, from Adelaide.'

‘Who?'

‘Nathan.'

‘Tell him to ring again . . . no, wait . . .'