Hill of Grace (24 page)

She released his hands and leaned back, watching a shunt in the distance pulling grape bins towards Seppelt's. ‘It's really about William, isn't it?'

He used his hands to express his disgust. ‘It's about how your dad allows William . . . have either of them asked me, you, but when it comes down to his . . . play, “Oh, I'm sorry, I wouldn't force them to do it.”'

‘Fine, I'll tell them: church okay, Mr Apocalypse . . .'

He shrugged. ‘He's a nut case.'

‘Eccentric.'

‘Nut case.'

‘When they grow up they'll look back and laugh.'

‘Maybe.'

When they got home that night Mary started saying the same thing. ‘Joseph, don't be so precious, it's an outing for them.'

Ellen took her mother's hand. ‘It's not a case of being precious, Joe feels no one's bothered asking him.'

Mary shrugged. ‘If the world ends it ends, if not, we've helped Willy empty his cellar. The kids love the play . . .'

Joseph frowned. ‘It's what the play's about.'

‘Why should you care? It could've been
Snow White
– doesn't mean they'll turn into dwarfs.'

He wasn't sure whether Mary was unconcerned or if it was one of her ways of getting around him. ‘I'll put on a play,' he continued. ‘I'll get William to play Satan, the children can be fallen angels.' Imagining the backdrop of an inverted cross, goat heads tied on with twine and a pentagram of his very own blood.

‘Now you're just trying to make a point,' Mary said.

‘Of course.'

‘It wouldn't bother me, Joseph.'

Ellen shrugged and returned to a pot of boiling noodles. ‘You decide, Joseph.'

He stood behind her. ‘And if I keep them home, will you stay with us or go to William's?'

No reply.

Nathan sat on a fallen log beside the North Para River. A bridge ran nearly directly overhead, its stone piers rumbling as cars and trucks passed by. He looked out over the low, soggy paddocks, full of sedge and weed, periodically flooded by storm-water – according to William, only good for the ching-chongs and their rice. Something his father said every time they went collecting mushrooms. A childhood of vitamins in a brown paper bag, William listing them alphabetically as their pants and socks got wetter and wetter. At which point William would pass on the family story of how Anthelm had encountered Aborigines out here, two or three dozen, in loincloth and war-paints, their women with mutilated breasts and their children hungry.

(In reality, before Anthelm had embellished the story for Robert, a single elder walking with his son, wearing an old suit from the government camp at Willunga, on the coast.)

Anthelm, in his usual way, had tried to shoo them away but when this failed, approached them, saying how it was his land now and how there were places provided for the native. Places where they'd be introduced to God and agriculture, learning to grow food and raise livestock in ways they'd failed to work out for themselves. ‘Out,' he called, shooing them again.

The son in the suit, wearing a bowler hat with cigarette stubs he'd collected in the band, laughed and said, ‘Has the Kaiser come with you?' Or words to that effect.

The elder led them towards the creek and, through his son's broken English, explained how his father was buried here, and where is your father buried?

‘Posen,' Anthelm replied, thinking how he'd been chased out of his own native land, and of how that's just the way life was. ‘The police will remove you if they find you,' he said, but the old man just started gathering wood for a fire. ‘I will fetch him, I will fetch the policeman,' Anthelm continued, as the son sat down and removed a pair of leather boots he'd found on a doorstep somewhere.

Unable to convince them, Anthelm sat down with them, eating his own mushrooms, eventually sharing them and trying to explain this Jesus fella the son had heard so much about. ‘Soon he will return, and if you have listened to us you will be saved.'

‘Saved? How saved?'

‘From Hell. From eternal punishment.'

The son's eyes had lit up. ‘Ah, we have a story like that.'

‘It's not a story.'

Apex would be closing. Nathan jogged towards town, along a dirt road of crushed sleepy lizards, of endless corrugations bordered with a white-work of winter irises, finished with masses of pink flowering sorrel and harlequin.

The photos on the wall of the bakery showed a nineteenth-century cottage with multiple chimneys smoking from wood-fired ovens. They showed the same scene, taken every few years, all featuring the owner, Peter Fechner's grandfather, standing in the same spot with the same pose, his handle-bar moustache unchanged through the years. Photos showing stability, cooks and store-girls inheriting their parents' jobs like real estate. Stability. Endless slabs of coffee cake and bienenstich walking out the door in warm paper bags.

Until Ute. Years ago Ute Hrirbar did to the Apex what Picasso did to portraits. Ute was the first and last of a new breed of dec o-rators in the valley. A painter by trade, he'd deserted off-cream, mauve and pale blue for orange and every green from Brunswick to Aqua-tint.

And it was all the Fechners' fault. They hadn't bothered checking his work before they hired him. When he'd said, ‘Something fresh, with a touch of the modern,' they thought he meant melamine and wood veneer. Instead, he'd started off with the exterior in Hi-Gloss white, ‘Apex' in stencilled plastic letters (raised above pink lights) in the style of Himmler's ‘Arbeit Macht Frei'. Inside it was lino all around, a thousand mis-matched lady bugs glued down onto polished cedar floorboards. The walls were striped red, white and blue with an imitation chrome finish around the door and window frames. Within months it was known as Fechner's Automat. When he was asked to explain, Ute said, ‘It's twentieth century.' The Fechners refused to settle and a lawyer was brought in to strike a compromise. The Fechners still planned to redecorate their shop. The daily question from tourists – Isn't this a German bakery? – suggested sooner better than later.

Lilli wrapped the yeasts and put them in a bag. Placing them in front of Nathan she said (in a mock German accent), ‘Also in ze valley, ve have bratwurst and leberwurst.'

Nathan smelt the bag. ‘You're paranoid.'

They locked up and walked with Thea, Lilli's off-sider, down Murray Street towards the Tanunda Club. The girls walked ahead, Nathan relegated to little brother status, and when a couple of cocky's sons looked at their bums and whistled he started to feel like excess baggage. The girls joined arms and talked between themselves; Nathan couldn't believe she was meant to be his girlfriend.

They stood at the back door to the club. Thea's bar-man boyfriend was quick with a few bottles of beer, seeing her off with a bite on the ear and some mock heavy breathing. Nathan followed behind again, settling for an occasional swig from Lilli's bottle. At one point she turned back and said, ‘Nathan's dad's waiting for the Messiah.'

Thea looked back at him and said, ‘He's one of those idiots with the pamphlets?'

And Lilli: ‘He
wrote
the pamphlet.'

They sat on a pile of bricks behind the railway station as Thea described her boyfriend in terms of a Cary Grant persona and Johnny Weissmuller physique. Nathan wasn't really expecting Lilli to respond with a glowing account of his own body, knowing that this was something the girls probably did in private. Still, some sort of acknowledgment of his existence would have been good.

‘I'll have to go in a minute,' he said, but Lilli just replied, ‘Why?'

Things should've been different. They should have been defacing library books or ripping at each other's clothes on the banks of Jacob's Creek. They could have been back in the Langbein grandstand, back into William's plonk he
thought
he'd gladly steal for her any day.

The girls were whispering. He couldn't hear what they were saying. Suddenly Thea looked at him. ‘Heard you fucked up your exams?'

He shrugged, glanced at Lilli and back at Thea. ‘That's okay. Something better came out of it. In Adelaide.'

Thinking, not that you'd care, being caught up in the centre of the universe.

The Apex universe. A budget Sigalas' without spearmint milkshakes. A universe of pot cakes floating about in snowdomes.

‘That's a pity,' Thea continued, looking back at Lilli.

‘How?' Nathan asked.

‘So close.'

‘So?'

‘Don't get defensive.'

‘Well say what you mean . . .' He looked at Lilli; she was trying to smile, but it was a smile for Thea. He thought, Fuck you, and all at once felt like Lilli's hobby again. What he needed was Phil, speaking his mind. He'd demolish Thea in a minute flat.

‘I don't mean anything. You're paranoid.'

But he knew what Lilli had said to her. She'd described how this little sixteen-year-old had followed her into the hills the day before his exams. Like a puppy. After twelve years of school, like he didn't realise what he was doing.

But he did. And that's why he felt so let down, again. Alone, like his only family was his Adelaide family.

He stood and walked off towards Murray Street. Lilli didn't follow him. He heard them laugh as he went and felt so angry he could have thrown the yeast against the platform.

But he didn't, the warmth and smell, signs of better things to come. He heard Thea calling, ‘See you, Nathan,' but didn't stop. When he was on the other side of the station he lowered his back down against a wall, putting his head on his knees, unsure of his thoughts.

After a few minutes he saw Lilli walking alone, coming in his direction. All of a sudden he knew how she saw him: pot-bellied and stiff-dicked, pallid, sweaty hair glued across his forehead, red cheeks and the lips of an angel, and teeth so white he had to be using All-Glo.

She walked past without seeing him, on towards town. He didn't say a word. He could do better. Whether it was in the dressing room of the Union Theatre or the shade of a Moreton Bay fig in Botanic Park. She was as surplus as the broad gauge axles the Railways had left around to rust.

William rested on Nathan's swing, watching individual drops of rain falling out of the sky, as if in slow motion, following a trajectory whipped up by the southerlies. Drops growing bigger on the leaves of Bluma's agapanthus, until they had enough weight to roll, exploding into shit-rich earth, reacting with nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and moving osmotically into the roots of yellowing tomato plants, ready to be green-mulched when he found some time.

The bells of Langmeil rang softly, but there were no clues. They didn't have the urgency of a Doms or the randomness of a Hermann. Maybe it was Henry himself, with a few of his young nephews: one two three, and pause, one two, and pause . . .

Nathan, sitting at the kitchen table, looked up as his father came in and sat opposite him. ‘Would you like to help me pick lemons?' William asked.

‘I suppose so.' Sighing. Caught up in Lilli's pants, two sizes too big, hitched up every minute or so, unconcerned that the elastic from her knickers showed or her cuffs had frayed beyond repair. A fine silver necklace and a ring she'd never explained. Clips holding back black hair she claimed was entirely natural, although he'd never seen a black-haired Hermann or Fechner.

‘You don't have to,' William continued.

‘I will.'

Nathan had spent half of the night awake in his loft, staring up at rafters planed by Anthelm and bolted by Robert, thinking how he just needed to get her alone, how he'd seen her as a follower for the first time but how everyone had their moments of indecision. Still, he wasn't about to go chasing after her, and if she appeared under his lemon tree . . .

‘“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit . . .”'

Bluma sat down and they bowed their heads. Nathan was busy running his finger behind Lilli's elastic, applying words such as grace and forgiveness and sin to his own situation, making Lilli the whore on the hill of fish and loaves, gathering up what she could carry to sell later. Held down by the faithful and stoned, but absolved by the wandering Messiah.

Grace. The promise of constant forgiveness. This is what still sustained Nathan. No one else promised and no one else delivered.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.
If you stepped back beyond that there was only darkness. You might be okay without the Bible for a day, a week, a month – but what about the times when you were tested? When you needed your faith? How would Bluma have sustained herself, lying in bed at Willow Hospital sixteen years before, blessed on one hand by the baby in her arms but cursed by the scar on her abdomen, where one of Mr Scholz's best had cut to find her uterus, bleeding from a haemorrhage three days after Nathan's arrival. Carried away in a stainless steel dish covered by a tea-towel as William watched them, up to their elbows in blood, threading and sewing and asking for surgical sponges. Whispering consolations from Hebrews chapter thirteen, ‘“Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight . . .”'

Nathan was a blessing, it was as simple as that. Bluma would forever curse the gingham tea-towel, but that was God's word and the word was with, and was, God.

And his son. William's devotion passed onto a celebration of Jesus, describing moments of healing and miracles such as water into wine. Jugs and jugs of the stuff. No one sure if it was cabernet or grenache, but wine nonetheless.

Nathan looked across at his father and frowned. William shrugged. ‘What?'

‘I'm not so sure.'

‘What?'

‘If it was meant so literally.'

William looked confused. ‘If what was?'