Hill of Grace (31 page)

Ellen, Catherine and Mary stood around the stage popping party streamers and throwing confetti, banging saucepan lids and adding their own screams of pain. Catherine, taken by the spirit, started casting alfoil-covered thunderbolts at the children, careful to avoid her own.

William stood up in front of all this, and spreading his arms, said, ‘It's not so far off. Are you prepared? Like water being sucked down a drain,
there is no way to avoid it
.'

And after the judging, who would be left, he asked. As if in reply, David, Chas and Vicky screamed and cast themselves down dead on the stage. The noise and motion stopped and everybody looked at their bodies. Lilli nodded her head, ‘Oh please, spare me,' but most of the market crowd seemed determined to see the story out.

‘There's no secret to salvation,' William said, ‘it's just hard work. Nothing comes from nothing. The Bible has all the answers.'

And with that the saved souls joined hands and danced around the bodies, joyous but not gloating. William explained how this was his mission, to save people from themselves. This time next year they'd be thanking him. Buying and selling vegetables in a market place of many empty stalls. He had studied the Word and seen these things.

Joseph Tabrar, on his lunch break, walked down John Street into Goat Square and couldn't believe what he saw. Fighting his way through the crowd he made his way to the stage and told his children to stand up. ‘Home,' he said, pointing, and they ran off without a word. He looked at Ellen and then at Seymour and then at William and said, ‘That's it.' Catching up with his children he grabbed their hands and pulled them down Murray Street towards what they called home. Throwing open the door, he told Vicky to run a bath for the three of them and take off their ridiculous costumes.

‘But it was fun,' she pleaded.

He made no reply, settling in on the lounge to await what it was he called his family. ‘Clean up,' he demanded, ‘then I'm taking you back to school.'

Back in Goat Square, Lilli Fechner watched the remaining Millerites pile their costumes and banner on the stage and start wheeling it back towards Arthur's place. Pathetic bastards, she thought, checking her watch and seeing she was ten minutes late. Walking back towards Apex, she realised that Nathan
had
proved himself, drifting away in a lifeboat from William's comedy of high farce.
She
was the one left behind, drifting, slowly sinking.

Seymour and Ellen, walking in the front door, were met by Joseph's stare. The splashing and laughing from the bathroom attracted Ellen but Joseph stood up. ‘No more Miller,' he said.

Seymour laughed. ‘Is that for you to say?'

Joseph walked towards him. ‘It is.'

‘What about Ellen, and what about the kids? You weren't there, you didn't see how much they enjoyed it.'

‘They're meant to be at school.'

‘One morning, come on.' Seymour didn't flinch.

‘They're my children.'

‘And it's my house.'

Joseph moved even closer to him. ‘So?'

‘You can't have it both ways. You need to compromise.'

‘
They are my children.
'

‘Don't raise your voice to me.'

Ellen stepped between them. ‘Stop.'

Joseph paused for a moment then walked off to the bathroom.

‘No more Miller.'

‘We'll see,' Seymour replied.

Joseph closed the bathroom door behind him just as Mary came in the front door carrying a pile of dirty costumes. ‘Guess who gets to wash these?' she laughed.

Ellen knocked on the bathroom door. ‘You better get back to work. I'll take the children to school.'

The door opened and Joseph appeared, refusing to speak to any of them. With little of the dramatic flair they'd displayed, he walked down the hallway and out the front door. Ellen looked at her mother. ‘Don't ask.'

That night, William, Bluma and Arthur formed a production line. At one end, William, the editor of the
Last Days
, a boy's own adventure in which he explained how the British had already picked a site for the detonation and fenced it off, herding up the black fellas but leaving the possums and kangaroos. How a crew had been picked and a bomber flown out for trials. How it was probably academic as the Russians or Yanks would use their bomb first, and how he had a suspicion when – the Cold War warming to a new year's climax some time after the Christmas sales but before Easter.

Bluma was the cutter, Arthur the paster, smoothing down the newsprint, cleaning off the excess glue and writing annotations according to William's strict format:
The Tanunda Oracle, September
15, 1951. Page 3, halfway up
. They were all clues to the future, hidden away in the bottom corner of page twelve so no one would notice. Except William. Looking at a page three spread of atrocities from the Korean War: stunted, grinning, mud-covered Reds holding up severed heads, bodies slumped in shallow trenches, two American kid-soldiers about to be executed, unsure whether to look at the camera or the rifles.

William moved the paper over so Bluma and Arthur could see as he tried to think of a link between communism and atheism and dead bodies frozen in contortions in the best Pompeii tradition. He tried to convince them that people could be brainwashed, lost, over-running the earth in a frenzy of evil justified by the need for shared capital.

He prayed, improvising, but after, worked on in silence, trying to work out what would happen to the innocents. So many of them, screaming into a void as empty as the Flinders Ranges, their voices echoing and fading without reply. God as a mighty river red gum, unmoved, forming growth rings as the years passed, each with its own unwritten history of birth, death, love, smog and betrayal. Man had been given free will and it was up to him how he used it. William knew that God couldn't be blamed for everything – we couldn't have it both ways, one minute starting revolutions and then looking for someone to blame when it all went wrong. ‘We're such a disappointment,' he mumbled, at last, imagining the faces of the Commies in their quilted uniforms as those of Rohwer and Fritschle.

Bluma could guess what he was thinking. ‘The kiddies'll be back,' she said.

William continued turning pages. ‘I hope so.' Thinking of Joseph holding three, small, severed heads, grinning.

Arthur sat forward. ‘It must be hard for him though . . . as a parent . . . if I had children . . .'

William looked at him. ‘He'll tear that family apart.' And not for the first time, Arthur stared at him, becoming alarmed at the evolving drama, wondering if it wasn't William's fate to scorch, or slowly poison, anyone who ventured too close to him. It shouldn't be like this, Arthur wanted to say, but couldn't. It should be about simple things: wood sorrel growing in irrigation ditches, sitting on the porch with the sun on your cheek, the smell of freshly turned wood. Praising God daily by being alive, participating, accepting . . .

Arthur had begun to suspect that he'd been misled. Two and a half thousand people, in Tanunda alone, couldn't be wrong. And out of the few believers William had scraped together, his group was shrinking at an exponential rate. Here was a man who could turn his back on people who'd shown him nothing but trust and friendship: Pastor Henry with his policy of God for everyone, Bruno, sharing endless sticks of wurst and homebrew, Trevor, happy to spend the night setting up everyone else's pins. All of them Christians. But not Christian enough. Failing one of the many tests William had set up for them somewhere along the way. So that the few remaining, Arthur felt, were no better than the brainwashed Reds, mouthing someone else's thoughts, chronically unable to think for themselves.

Arthur knew William wouldn't stop at destroying a family. With Joseph gone, Seymour would bring the rest of them in line.

‘Those kiddies had the time of their life yesterday,' William said. ‘Problem is, you can't make people like Joseph see sense . . . Tabrar, isn't that a Yiddish name?' Going on to recall that Joseph was a valley ring-in who'd never made an effort to adapt. ‘Did the post office transfer him, or did he want to come?'

Bluma shrugged. ‘He got that job after.'

‘Nonsense. I'm sure he wanted to come. Which makes you wonder why. He's never stopped complaining.'

Arthur put the lid on the glue and spoke softly. ‘He was transferred here.'

‘Same difference. Work for the PMG you'd expect it. Local people should expect
them
to make an effort.'

‘He did,' Arthur defended. ‘Married local, settled down and had kids.'

‘Settled down? Ha.'

Arthur wiped his hands on his pants. ‘We haven't been here all that long, William.'

‘Long enough.'

‘William, if you want to get people behind you . . .'

William looked at him, surprised. ‘What do you mean?'

‘You shouldn't be so . . . selective. You make it hard for people.' Arthur had a vision of William at the door of his very own church, checking identity papers, birth certificates, racial profiles and character references of potential worshippers. Going inside and preaching to a church empty except for the reliable few.

The next day Arthur found himself back beside William, harvesting cabbages and pulling weeds from the Miller vegetables. It was no good saying he'd try to see less of William. Living so close there was no way around it. Waking up with a tap on the window, there he was, pushing open a louvre that had never been locked. ‘Couldn't spare an hour or two?' And what could you say? That's how things were done in the valley – pull some weeds in return for a couple of cabbages, carnations for Bluma's table, leftover shiraz for digging a ditch.

It was a hot day. When it came to vegetables, William knew no shame. With his shirt off, his stomach hung heavy over a belt which had missed nearly every loop, working its way up to his pubic region, half-exposed through an open fly which wouldn't have bothered him even if he knew. Arthur was more conservative, pulling his sleeves down to protect his arms and making a hanky-hat in the accepted English style.

‘Hey, Arthur,' William called, cutting cabbages at ground level with a razor-sharp knife. ‘Ever thought of changing
your
name back?'

‘No.' Barely looking up from bent-grass which was beyond the help of any fork.

‘Maybe it's been long enough.'

‘I'm happy with my name,' Arthur whispered, wiping his forehead.

‘Only, it's not your name.'

‘It is.'

They worked on silently. Artur Weidemann, who'd changed his name on William's advice, had never missed the clunkety, Germanic handle he'd inherited from countless generations of cabinet-makers. Blessitt had been chosen for its poetry, its grace, its ability to move him away from the squareness and solidness of a silky oak Weidemann past. Then there had been the case of a European Weidemann, a mass murderer or child killer or some such, and people remembered, tracing genes back as far as it took to make a connection. Blessitt was a new beginning, an Australian beginning, a beginning of fresh lisianthus and carnations, the type of thing his dying father had warned him against but suspected he'd do anyway. ‘What's become of Wilhelm Muller?' Arthur asked, without lifting his head.

‘I've filled out the form. Persuading people's another thing.'

‘Why don't you stick with William? It's not so bad.'

‘But I'm not William, I'm Wilhelm. This is all Hitler's fault. I won't have him ruining everything.' William smiled and stood up, straightening his back. ‘Eh, imagine it at the pearly gate. St Paul says, “There's no Wilhelm Muller here,” and I reply, “But I swear, I changed my name back, didn't they send you the paperwork?”' He laughed, but Arthur still didn't look up, wondering whether this was from William's sermon of the empty church.

Bluma emerged from the house and approached them, holding out an open letter to William and waiting. ‘What is it?' he asked, slashing the knife to within an inch of his fingers.

‘Nathan.'

He worked on silently.

‘Are you going to read it?'

No reply. She paused, returned it to her apron pocket, turned and went inside. The two men worked on without a word, sweating, stretching, wiping salty water from their eyes. In time Arthur asked, ‘How's the apprenticeship going?' and when William ignored him, he decided he'd had enough of Mr Muller.

He finished his work, throwing his weeds onto William's compost pile and walking home with an armful of cabbages. Sitting at his kitchen table, wiping his face with a cold flannel, he knew what he had to do. He took a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote. When he finished he cooked tea, ate, cleaned up and sat on his back porch with a jug of home-made lemonade. At ten o'clock, when he knew he wouldn't be seen, he walked over to William's back door and slid the note under.

William found it the next morning, whispering to Bluma over his oats, ‘Arthur is no longer with us.'

‘What do you mean?'

He handed her the note and she read it. In it Arthur explained how his God was a living, breathing, gentle being, full of love and forgiveness. But how, since his time with the group, he'd been unable to accept an image of God as Gestapo man, promising a hell of fire and pain to everyone who didn't subscribe to certain views. He closed by asking if they could still be friends, as their families had been for generations, but thought it unlikely, considering the way William had treated his own son, for instance.

Next morning, when Arthur was out getting water from his tank, he looked over to see William back at work in his vegetable patch, pulling weeds, oblivious to any part of the world beyond his fence.

Chapter Fourteen

Nathan realised how easily life could become one of Rose's romance novels, read and re-read until its very cheesiness became real through familiarity. Standing in his room, staring out of the window at Bob's severely pruned iceberg roses, he listened to Rose singing along with Nat King Cole. ‘“Unforgettable, that's what you are . . .”' And although to her it meant the laughter of kiddies at the hospital, chow mein, almonds candying on a late winter morning, Phillip's eternal harping in her ear – to Nathan it was just Lilli.