Hill of Grace (3 page)

On Saturday night, as the Seppelt date palms cast long shadows across the paddocks of West Tanunda, and the sun dipped and flattened itself against a horizon of stray eucalypts, William stood with his hands on his hips in his darkening kitchen as Bluma paced out their living space. ‘Thirty by twenty-four, that's . . .'

William furrowed his brow. ‘Seventy-two square . . . around eight yards.'

Bluma's eyes lit up. ‘William, we could afford at least one room.'

‘Bluma.'

‘This floor's no good for my lungs.'

Bluma had read that patterned lino was out for thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a yard at the Big Store. Still, what was the point? William wouldn't have a bar of it. Just like the suits they were practically giving away at five-and-a-half shillings. Same story. She knew he was determined to go on wearing Robert's. ‘This suit is so dated,' she'd argue, but in the same way he'd retained his chin whiskers, he would retain his dad's clothes. As long as they still fit and as long as the naphthalene did its job.

‘I'm late,' he said, consulting Anthelm's fob-watch, slipping on his jacket and making for the door.

‘At least consider it,' she pleaded, brushing him down as he left.

As the sun disappeared below the horizon the Langmeil bells rang out across the town, as they did from Gnadenberg and Strait Gate and every other church throughout the valley, reminding everyone that tomorrow was a day of worship.

William made his way between an avenue of candle pines which led up a hill to Langmeil. At the top, in front of the church's open oak doors, Joshua Heinz stood smiling, watching William's progress and sucking on a pipe.

‘Evening,' William greeted him, crunching gravel and stepping over the crumbling steps. ‘Is everyone here?'

‘Just about,' Joshua replied. ‘Apart from Carl Sobels, he sends his apology, apparently his daughter-in-law's in hospital.'

‘Serious?'

‘The voices again. She's soft, if you ask me.'

‘Satan,' William smiled. ‘What she needs is a good praying over.'

‘Running over,' Joshua grinned at his old friend, tapping out the used tobacco.

Joshua lived in a three-roomed cottage with his wife and six children, all of whom slept in a single room with triple bunks which Sarah, his eldest, had pointed out, were no different from the ones in Auschwitz. He supported them by selling insurance, and at harvest, helping out with picking here and there. His Bible was just as well worn as William's, but he didn't share his friend's fixation with the promises of Revelations. I'm happy with an old-fashioned Jesus, he'd say to William. A Jesus who buys insurance and stops my milk from curdling.

While the Tanunda Liedertafel set up for Saturday night's rehearsal in the Langmeil vestry, the wives of the singers gathered in William's lino-less living-room, talking, drinking coffee and stuffing a quilt for Mary Hicks' daughter Ellen. It was an impromptu Federschleissen, a quilting-bee sustained by Bluma's finest rhubarb crumble. The feathers were replaced by a synthetic stuffing Bluma had ordered from a catalogue but not told William about. The coffee was instant – again, hidden in the cold cellar.

Back at Langmeil, William and Joshua sat among the small group, waiting for their conductor Harry Rasch. There were only three more Saturdays before Farm Day, their annual celebration of cucumbers and cows, work-wear, boots and demonstrator tractors.

As it generally always did, William's and Joshua's conversation drifted onto the North Koreans and the 38th Parallel, which could only lead to China and the bomb. William excitedly broke the news of Maralinga and Emu Plains, but Joshua already knew. ‘I'm keeping a scrapbook,' William explained. ‘I'm gathering documentary evidence.'

‘Of what?' Joshua asked.

‘Clues . . . God speaks through the papers too, Joshua.'

Joshua Heinz thought about this and replied, ‘Where is it written in the Bible, that this would be the time?'

William had to stop to think. ‘Revelations.'

‘Yes?'

But then realised he couldn't link it to the Bible, yet.

‘The thing is,' Joshua continued, ‘people have been looking for clues, and finding them, for two thousand years.'

William lit up, remembering a pasted article. ‘What about Lake Eyre? First time it's flooded since white man.'

Joshua shrugged. ‘William, there's always something going on: a bushfire, a flood . . .'

William stared at the calluses on his hands and wondered whether he didn't have some work to do yet. ‘I'll find it, and I'll show you,' he whispered.

‘He's overdue,' Joshua agreed, consolingly, ‘but if you're not careful people will laugh at you.'

‘Who would?' Ron Rohwer asked, settling in behind them. Josh turned to him. ‘Hello, Ron, we were just wondering – ' ‘When he's ready,' Ron smiled, moving his stare across to William. ‘Wilhelm, you been reading the stars again?'

‘Who'll be beside his throne?' William asked bluntly, refusing to have this conversation with Ron again.

‘We all will. It's not helpful, Wilhelm.'

William stopped short, biting his tongue, shelving his lecture about Artaxerxes and the winepress of God's furious anger and his embryonic ideas about the ‘prophetic period' as it related to Christ's ministry. Bluma had warned him off Ron Rohwer, seeing how Ron was an Elder at Langmeil, holding considerable sway within the congregation. Joshua was right, he had to have more than a few old clippings. He needed dates and facts as they were laid down in the Bible. Joshua was right also, of course, in saying many had mis-read the signs of their own time – describing the Egyptian village which, in 1912, stuffed and took to worshipping a dog that had been killed by a meteorite – but William had a gut feeling that
he
was right.

Harry Rasch arrived and produced his baton from a velvet-lined case. Soon they were set upon a song of praise which they would sing beside more gentle folk tunes.

Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work and defend thee,
Surely his goodness and mercy shall attend thee . . .

As William used his ear to find harmony and fit his voice within the layers of song, all he could hear was the slightly flat bass of Rohwer in his ear, droning, threatening to upset the balance. He could imagine himself turning and shouting, ‘Shut up!' but again could only hear Bluma warning him off.

Bluma stoked the fire of her black kitchen as the ladies' fingers darted over faultless seams the Big Store could only dream about.

‘“Ponder anew, What the Almighty can do . . .”' they sang, in harmonies less figured but just as lusty in their delivery.

Nathan Miller sat in the raised loft above the living-room which was his bedroom. He heard the women's melody but substituted his own words. ‘“Praise the Lord, the Almighty King of Pricks, under the table, with a dozen lopped dicks . . . ”'

Chapter Two

William stood in front of Langmeil with his hands behind his back, bobbing rhythmically to the song of a bar-tailed godwit in the candle pines. He read from the notice-board as the spirit of Kavel, Lutheran pioneer, drifted in fitful gusts from the cemetery.

Sunday School, 9.45, Herb Medlin and the older children will
lead using the theme ‘Ascension of Jesus' based on Acts 1: 6–11.
Mrs Fox will provide the music.

As they waited for the rostered usher, Ian Doms, to open the church doors, Bluma picked dead-heads off roses and Nathan sat on the steps crushing soursobs between his fingers. William looked at him – ‘Nathan . . .' – and went on to survey a range of notices, from next week's quilting through to the sale of a washer with motorised wringer, near new, all offers over thirty pounds considered.

The bells started ringing and William, recognising Bruno's erratic style, knocked on the doors. ‘Bruno, open up.' Ian arrived with his keys and started working on the cast-iron lock which hardly ever opened from the outside. ‘Here, give me a go,' William demanded, but Ian was already halfway around to the back door.

The Millers stood before the locked doors silently as the bells stopped and William heard the voices of Bruno and Ian chatting. He fancied he could hear them laughing. ‘Bruno, Ian,' William called, knocking even louder, but the laughing just started again. William shook his head and made his way around the back.

Bluma stepped towards the notices and admired a poster of Victor Mature and Susan Heywood in
Demetrius and the Gladiators
. ‘Unlike Pastor Henry,' she whispered to her son.

‘It's a charity event,' he replied, glowing with visions of Christian-full lions parading before the Emperor with contented grins.

As the bells started again the Tanunda Lutheran faithful closed doors on warm cottages and made their way along streets of arum and belladonna lilies, under date palms heavy with fruit and past half-empty churches of every other denomination. William believed that the Catholic church, built in the 1890s, still stood for everything unreformed and unrefined, Father Pallhuber celebrating mass on behalf of dour, corpulent popes with a hankering for gold and choir boys. The Methodists had come to Tanunda too, in the form of a dozen or so Wesleyans with a seeder and combine. Their wheat purchased a plot and built a church on Irvine Street, away from the real business of a German god brandishing mettwurst and thunderbolts. The descendants of the twelve still made their way to Irvine Street every Sunday but they were the religious white trash of the valley.

Arthur Blessitt, out inspecting trial plots of strelitzia and Geraldton wax, heard the Langmeil bells, stood up, adjusted his tie and headed off towards town. Stopping in at Mr Wilmhurst's, Tanunda's gout-stricken blacksmith, he dropped off a pot of raw beef tea which he promised would have him up and about in no time. Passing the Savings Bank and Turner's dress shop, he turned into Langmeil's avenue of candle pines and crossed himself, overcome by a spirit stronger than an ocean of chamomile or reservoirs of barley water. ‘“Our help is in the name of the Lord,”' he whispered, making his way towards the steps, where Bruno Hermann shook his hand and handed him the order of service and hymnal, asking about the progress of his grandson's pillow box. ‘One more week, Bruno, I promise. I was sold green wood. I refuse to work with green wood.'

Meanwhile, Joshua Heinz pulled the youngest of his six children off Menge's spotlights, a pair of Electricity Trust surplus spots rigged up in an enclosed bunker no one had bothered to fill in since the war. Anton Menge, trying to prove his, and his town's, loyalty during the Second World War, had painted the lights with crude Union Jacks held by an emu and kangaroo, in anticipation of stukas and dorniers on the horizon. Joshua stood behind his children and clapped his hands twice, saying, ‘Walk on,' and smiling at Catherine, his wife. His children continued single file, along the road, up the avenue of pines and into the church.

Just as Ian Doms was about to give Edna Hermann the nod to start playing, he saw Seymour Hicks at the bottom of the avenue, unloading his family from a converted hearse he'd purchased at Syd Wenham's 1940 fire-sale. Seymour's wife, Mary, walked up the slight incline arm-in-arm with their daughter Ellen Tabrar, followed closely behind by her husband Joseph and their three children. Joseph was a Lutheran by marriage, a not-so-religious postal worker who still lived with his in-laws, although he had plans – to build, to move his family away from the Hicks', to bring his children up in a suburban paradise of couch and short-leaved fescue.

If Joshua was in William's left ear, Seymour was forever in his right, whispering how William was right to be worried about Revelations and its hidden dates. Seymour was the straight man, feeding lines, encouraging a friendship that stretched back thirty years. Seymour was six-foot-two and lanky, pot-bellied and unstable enough to sway in the wind at family barbecues. He talked softly but meant every word he said. Life was serious, the Bible said so.

‘Seymour will be forever parking the hearse,' Mary Hicks said to Bruno, looking to Edna and giving the nod as her daughter seated the children at the back and asked Ian if Herb Medlin was still taking Sunday School.

Edna played her own version of
O Heilige Dreifaltigkeit
, a morning hymn, as the congregation hushed in anticipation. When she finished, Ian Doms stood up and asked the children to follow Herb Medlin and Mrs Fox into the vestry. Nathan watched on, newly graduated himself, wondering what he'd do when he replaced Herb, when the Goebbels of the vestry took two weeks off to visit his rellies in Brizzie.

Apart from Mr Wilmhurst, tucked up in bed with his raw beef tea, the congregation was complete. On one side the men, fortifying themselves with peppermints and Altona drops, on the other side the women, holding methane-heavy bowels closed against the cold of Langmeil.

On the men's side, at the front, a row of church Elders sat respectfully: Gunther Fritschle, an old-school Lutheran whom William had given up on, knowing Gunther himself had given up on Christ-made-real amongst them; Ron Rohwer, William's singing companion, the eternally flat baritone droning away in his left ear; Trevor Streim, the man who understood the elusiveness of the perfect pin, its form as unknowable as the face of Christ himself.

And the parishioners: Bruno Hermann, William's neighbour, and his wife Edna, straining to focus on sheet music she generally disregarded; Bruno and Edna's children and grandchildren, including Lilli Fechner, searching out Nathan across the aisle, Ian, Arthur, the Millers, the Heinzes and the Hicks', Julius Rechner and many more silent, featureless faces, in churches across the valley, summoned by imported Silesian bells, singing hymns in a dis-harmony as subtle and yet obvious as Menge's two spotlights.

Pastor Henry approached the altar and the congregation rose. ‘“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,”' he intoned, straightening his robes and trying to conceal an unmovable beetroot stain. ‘Amen,' the congregation echoed, as Edna adjusted her stool and started in on a hymn of Invocation.