Free Hill of Grace by Stephen Orr

Ovingham mother screamed at her children and returned to scrubbing the pedestal of a bird bath by the salvaged light of a hallway globe. Moths crowded street lights rusted to the sides of stobie poles and a gas man worked by torch light to uncover meters overgrown with honeysuckle. She looked at Nathan and said, ‘Your father’s right.’
    Taking the voucher, she ripped it in half and slipped it out of the window. William watched it scatter and settle in front of a cemetery. Nathan looked at her but didn’t speak. Bluma wanted to explain but didn’t know how to say it in the same way William could. Things weighed you down. Things bred expectations of more things. Things were a barrier between man and God, and consequently, a man and his family.
    As she fell asleep that night, Bluma wondered if tomorrow she’d regret throwing the voucher out of the window. She thought, why would God have this dampness forever in my lungs?
    Later that night, William closed his study door and opened his Bible, reading, words falling from his lips in whispers. ‘“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers . . .”’
    And stopped, closing his eyes, allowing comic book images to crowd his head. Miller as Aronson as the Devil, waving his baton wildly, screaming, in a giant speech balloon, ‘“Traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God . . .”’
    A bit of lino, Bluma thought, as she drifted off to sleep, how could he deny me that?

Chapter Five
    The following weeks were a succession of sauerkraut and yeast, hands stained red and rain hanging perpetually above the valley. William and Joshua worked hard to finish the harvest before the mould took hold and swarms of galahs, descending between the rain clouds with shafts of sunlight behind them, settled on the heaviest bunches – eating a grape or two and letting the rest drop in the mud.
    The morning mists floated weightlessly above William’s cucumbers and the ants on his myrtle had disappeared into a hole somewhere. Returning to the wash-house with grapes, his pants would be soaked up past the knees, his socks wet through the eternally unrepaired holes in his boots.
    As he put the grapes through the crusher they split and run, the must draining down a tube into a barrel. More yeast, a gentle stir and another batch sealed, fermenting on-skin until it was ready to be strained through stockings – the only time Bluma could be seen buying nylons, sheer and medium, which she stretched over the decanting tap of William’s barrels, as the men removed sludge and skins in preparation for the secondary ferment.
    After these few weeks Joshua and William’s picking was finished, the barrels bubbling away happily in fulfilment of a promise God had made and William had done his best to honour. He figured he’d make just over six hundred bottles, up on last year’s five fifty. Then there were the labels and the packing and the endless round of bottle shops in Seymour’s hearse: Gawler, Kapunda and beyond, tardy publicans and shop managers saying, ‘We do have an arrangement with Seppelts.’
    But it wasn’t just wine which had been filling his head. William had sent apologies to Bible study for the last three Monday nights.
    â€˜Unlike William,’ Arthur Blessitt had said, when it came his turn to open up his home.
    â€˜He’s deep in study,’ Joshua commented.
    â€˜Study?’
    â€˜Dates. He’s convinced. A clue here, a clue there. A word, a phrase someone missed. At least that’s how I understand it.’
    Eyebrows raised, coffee sipped, as if they’d just discovered William had a fetish for dressmaking.
    But William’s fetish went far beyond that. He’d started off by locking himself in his study at six every night, only emerging for custard