Hill of Grace (33 page)

Arthur walked on, whispering to himself, ‘For the love of Jesus.'

It had come to him after the split with William. The message was simple: God could be found in olive groves and marketplaces, on the Graetztown Corner, walking beside the stone walls of Henschke's Hill of Grace. These were the places he'd find God, and these were the places he'd go, seeking out people and telling them the News. And in searching these people out, he'd experience his own revelations: baked beans more divine than Bluma's rhubarb crumble, nights as still and peaceful as childhood sleep-outs on the Pewsey Vale Peak. Along the way he could speak to people about
his
God, the god of grace and forgiveness who rode along beside Jimmy Hoffmann, protecting him from moving vans and strays.

It wouldn't be a mission as such. He'd be happy to leave it at a smile or a wave, sharing cheese sambies on the steps of the Seppelt mausoleum. No preaching or using the Scriptures to argue a point. That was the old way. He'd carry his Bible, but that was to pray for the ones who wanted it. ‘Give me a dose of the Gospels, Arthur,' they'd ask, holding his hand, seeking consolation from things last heard at the Metho Sunday School. In this way God would travel the valley and beyond, doing what the disciples had done as they wore out endless pairs of sandals. Doing what William had failed to do.

An old Ford pulled up on the verge, chugging uneasily in the afternoon sun. A hand motioned for Arthur to approach and he went around to the driver's side. A small man in a suit and tie looked out and asked, ‘You're Arthur Blessitt?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm Scholz, Doctor Scholz. My grand-dad had the hospital at Light Pass. Homeopathic. You use Altona drops?'

‘Sometimes. Used to be rheumy in the knees, but one day it just cleared up, all of a sudden.'

‘Thing is, I got the cancer, in me bowels. They put me in a nappy. I ain't scared to tell you that, Arthur. I ain't scared cos I got Jesus.'

‘Amen.'

Jesus, sitting on the torn upholstery beside him, studying road maps and suggesting short cuts, watching his speed and ushering him towards the grave.

‘Pray for me, Arthur, pray for me.'

Something Seymour or Joshua or Arthur himself had never asked William to do, although he did it anyway. Arthur put his hand on Scholz's arm and prayed, and when he finished, Scholz put a five-pound note in Arthur's top pocket and drove off without speaking.

Arthur knew he wasn't the first. Years ago he'd read about a fella who'd gone through seventeen pairs of shoes walking through Africa, spreading his message to the lost tribes. He'd been attacked by baboons in Kenya and a green mamba snake in Ghana, chased by elephants in Tanzania and gorged by a crocodile in Zimbabwe. He'd eaten squid in ink in Djibouti as soldiers with machine guns watched him suspiciously. He'd had his cross thrown under a truck and stolen in Capetown. The next morning he'd found the blackened wheel in a cold campfire. But he'd found a carpenter and had another one made, going on to feast on monkey legs in Chad and rat soup in Mozambique. He'd set up in the middle of shanty towns and spewed St Paul in technicolour verse over bemused black fellas with three words of English. Still, this evangelist had believed, watching the sun rise over Mount Kilimanjaro, he was doing the right thing, and would be rewarded.

Misguided, Arthur thought, transmuting the example of Christ into arrogance, telling empty stomachs what they'd done to deserve hunger.

That night he lit a fire in a clearing adjacent to a road-side rest stop. After he'd finished his beans he went for a walk and found a deserted graveyard, the headstones broken and overgrown by weeds. He tried to read the fragments of names and dates, indecipherable apart from
Hier ruhen in Gott
and
Schlafen Sie
Wohl
. An impression of a vine-encrusted anchor was still intact, still attached to an ironstone cross as impermanent as his own. Returning to the camp, he cleaned his cross with a rag, so that the inscription he'd burnt into it –
What shall I render to the Lord?
– could be read from a slow-moving car.

He settled into his swag until, just after dark, a moped-riding reporter from the
Oracle
pulled into the rest stop. He got off and came over to Arthur.

‘You're the fella wrote that article?' Arthur asked.

‘Mr Miller's mission?'

‘Yes.'

‘I just wrote what I saw. Mind if I join you?'

‘No, go ahead, I only have beans.'

‘I've eaten.' The reporter sat down, scanning the camp site for copy – narcotics, religious pamphlets, anything. ‘I came looking for you,' he said. ‘Pastor Henry said you've fallen out with Miller?'

‘If that's why you're here – ' ‘No, honest, I've said enough about him.'

Just then Seymour Hicks' hearse slowed down and pulled over on the opposite side of the road. Arthur stood up and waved as Chas and David wound down the back window. ‘Hello, Arthur.'

‘Pull up the window,' he heard Seymour scream, tooting his horn in the absence of a better insult, and speeding off. Arthur sat down, somewhat taken back, staring into the fire. The reporter sat forward. ‘Yer not breakin' bread with him either, eh?'

‘That's personal,' Arthur replied.

‘Sorry. When's their big day?'

‘March.'

‘You changed your mind?'

‘I said I don't want to – ' ‘Okay. Well, let's talk about this,' said the reporter, pointing to the cross and extracting a notepad. ‘What are you trying to say?'

‘Nothing. Jesus said, “Take your cross and screw on a wheel.”

So I did.'

‘Jesus actually said this to you?'

Arthur spoke slowly, trying to remain calm. ‘No, listen, I know what you're after. Why don't you just say it as it is?'

‘Which is?'

Arthur moved about uncomfortably on the ground. ‘Yesterday this big fella stops his car and comes over to me. He takes the cross and lays it down and lifts me up in the air by the scruff. I say, “Hey, you look like a big, strong fella, can you help me carry my cross?” And five minutes later he's carrying it towards Springton. We stop at a deli for a coffee and someone has to drive him back to his car. That's what I'm doing. I'm putting up a big billboard, Come Try Jesus! Some people stop and say I must have a lot of guts, but it's not me, it's Jesus.'

‘But that's what Mr Miller said.'

‘Listen, you don't have to stop if you don't want to.'

They moved onto a discussion of where he'd go next and Arthur explained he was getting tired and might head home for a spell.

‘And after that?' the reporter asked.

‘Getting my steam up. Maybe head off towards Adelaide.'

‘What would they think of you there?'

‘Jesus goes everywhere.'

On his way home the next day, Arthur stopped in at the
Oracle
's offices and had his picture taken in front of the press on which the Millerites had printed their leaflets.

(An irony which escaped him. When William read the article the next day he cut it out and stuck it in his scrapbook, finishing it off with a border of red exclamation marks and the comment, ‘Take up your cross?')

Two days later Arthur set off for Adelaide. By the time he returned, six weeks later, he was a minor celebrity, having featured in both daily papers several times, each time with a bigger photo and cornier caption: ‘I walk for the love of Jesus', ‘Jesus walks beside me on Main North Road'. There was none of the angle they'd tried for in Tanunda, none of the village idiot or religious freak. One mother, having brought her child to be kissed, claimed he was a modern miracle. But when an article appeared claiming he was gaining cult status, he'd decided it was time to head home.

During all this time, William Miller bought the Adelaide papers daily, searching them for any reference to Arthur and reading the articles aloud to Bluma. ‘“One guy shot at me from a pickup truck. Apparently he missed.” “Apparently” – what does that mean, is he trying to be funny?' Snipping and gluing away, trying to make sense of how such an idiot could be so loved.

Nathan Miller read the stories to Bob and Rose, explaining how Arthur used to push him on his swing. One day Nathan set off with Phil to find his old babysitter on Churchill Road. The
Advertiser
had started publishing a ‘Where's Arthur today?' timeline, hour by hour, but Arthur had caught on and decided to change his route. The boys waited with a dozen others for about an hour but Arthur was nowhere to be seen.

When Arthur arrived home at last, the Langmeil Elders – along with the mayor, the local, state and federal members, the CWA president and Rotary representatives – started visiting him with presents of yeast and woodworking tools, asking him where he was off to next and if they could walk with him for a way (along with a photographer or two). Pastor Henry claimed it would be good for the church, imagining photos of Arthur and the Elders between the Langmeil pines, proclaiming their faith and way of life and the fact that God walked with
them
. A writer from a women's magazine contacted Arthur asking about perseverance and inner strength but again he just said, ‘No, not me. Jesus did this.' (She had no idea what he meant, dropping the story in favour of an ‘at home' with Rock Hudson.)

In time it would all die down and he could be off again. This time he decided he'd go somewhere quieter, inland, or the southeast. Somewhere where he could find people who hadn't heard about him, joining him to pray in front of post offices and public toilets.

After Arthur had been home a week he went to sit in the sun on his back porch. His flowers were overgrown and needed harvesting, but all in good time. He looked around and saw William Miller staring at him from across the fence. William bowed his head and walked inside. Arthur could see where the Millerites had worn out the grass worshipping in front of his other cross.

PART
Three

Chapter Fifteen

Summer turned the wild oats golden from St Kitts to the Potter's Field. Down Murray Street the carob trees sagged and fig trees wept, dropping fruit into the back of double-parked utes. Old couples walked slowly, stopping to rest in the shade, to remember the smell of beer-wet carpet from the couplings of the Tanunda Hotel. Dust blew up from between the graves in front of Langmeil, settling across the road and on the grass of the Lutheran school, its sprinklers laying out patterns to nourish weeds along cracked footpaths. In the hospital, wedged between the swimming pool and endless vines, porters wandered basement corridors, hiding in storerooms to escape the heat and smell of boiled cabbage. Bruno and Edna Hermann bought a Kelvinator cooler and hung it out of their kitchen window, shutting their blinds and locking themselves away for days at a time. William Miller, trying to fall asleep with his window open, couldn't ignore the noise, storming onto his front porch and calling, ‘Some of us have no choice!'

But the Hermanns were snoring, hermetically sealed in a sarcophagus of recycled air which Bluma could only envy as she lay awake sweating, listening to William pacing the verandah.

Church Avenue, Kilburn, had transformed too. After the first few stinkers, people emerged from their red-brick ovens of an evening, dragging Onkaparinga rugs and carrying teddy-bears and eskies full of Bickford's cordial. Settling in on the freshly cut lawn on the reserve, they shared stories from a long, cold winter – who'd died of what, who'd married who and if it was true that Premier Playford had the cancer. Late at night a few would resort to war songs, remembering the time, not so long ago, when they dug an air-raid shelter where the council had since planted hydrangeas. Eventually everything would fall quiet, the still night filled with the music of crickets and someone's dad jogging home for a trot-stop.

Milk warm in leaky fridges, ice-boxes forever dripping on lino. Houses left open as voices distantly mingled to the tune of a radio someone had set up on the end of seven extension cords. Mo amongst the hibiscus, a sparkling new N-class loco whistling off down the hill towards Islington. And someone saying to Rose, ‘That boarder of yours, he don't never go home.'

‘I know. His people are zealots.'

Receiving a look of,
I'm sure you know what's best
.

In mid-December, as most of the valley folk were harvesting pines and pickling pig for Christmas, William continued his program of door knocking. On a bright, clear, blue-skyed Tuesday, as the sun warmed the footpaths of Munzberg Court, he walked along in polished black shoes, real leather soles taking the heat up into his feet. Every step was a step closer. Aching corns and doors slammed in his face were a sure sign of salvation. He wore his father's grey suit and a tie Bluma had bought him for their anniversary. Which one, he thought, wood, tin, opal? It was before the war, but after the worst of the Depression. Time was like that, blurring in giant swathes, a million little memories transforming into one, small victories inflating like a prize pumpkin at the Tanunda show.

He opened a gate and navigated a weedy yard, tapping on a fly-screen door which was mostly all holes. ‘Hello,' he called, softly, down the hallway.

‘That you, Sue?'

‘No, my name is William Miller, I was wondering if we could talk.'

He heard furniture shifting and a kettle whistling, the clang of metal and then silence. A budgie, hanging on the front porch, flitted around its cage trying to escape the sun. William took it down and placed it in the shade. ‘Hello?'

‘I'm comin' . . . is it important?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're after money?'

‘No.'

William sat down on a petrol drum and waited. Time was on his side.

Further up the street, Joshua Heinz stopped, looking at a piece of paper and saying to his youngest son, ‘Two more streets, if not we go home.'