Hill of Grace Read Free

Barossa?’
    Lilli looked at William. ‘Place up north. Middle of the desert. Maralinga.’
    As she wrapped his honey cakes and put them in a bag beside a half pound of the bakery’s yeast, William watched her fingers become the legs of a spider, crawling down from China towards South Australia, consuming everything and everyone in its path. ‘The British are too quick to be with the Americans,’ he observed, to which she replied, ‘It took both of them to stop the Fascists.’
    â€˜ He was the least of our concerns,’ Miller continued.
    She smiled one last time and gave him his change. ‘We’re all quick to change our tune.’
    â€˜Not me,’ he trailed off, as he dropped the coins in his pocket and exited the shop.
    William sat under a pencil pine and ate his cake as he watched Nathan lose again. Bluma had warned him to keep his comments to himself: Nathan had threatened to stop playing if William kept coaching him from the sidelines. ‘Backhand, Nathan, both hands . . . watch your footing!’ A shop-keeper’s son from Gawler demolished him in straight sets and they were soon walking home across paddocks overgrown with freesias and wood sorrel.
    As they went, William’s landscape smelt more of sulphur than must, was lit more by atomic flashes than the dusty summer light over the Pewsey Vale Peak. Nathan, meanwhile, had other thoughts on his mind: Lilli Fechner’s green, translucent eyes, her Shirley Temple dimples and her uncanny ability to say something without saying it. Lilli, his hero, the only girl he knew who could publicly humiliate his father without him knowing.
    William Miller passed along the creek which formed the bottom boundary of his property. Wild olive trees, their fruit only of interest to the crows, clung to the banks where floods had washed away the silt and exposed their roots. A white flowering iris crept down from a fallow paddock but mostly the creek was just rocks and the murky water they shared with the Seppelts.
    Harlequin flowers ranged yellow to orange as they followed the path up toward the showground. Off amongst his carnations, Arthur Blessitt, the Miller’s other neighbour, worked on his knees debudding stems as straight as a Cartesian plane. ‘Coming?’ William called, across a paddock Arthur had turned over to roses.
    â€˜Of course,’ he replied, standing and shaking his head. ‘Go on without me, I’ve finished the new pins.’
    Arthur watched William continue on toward the showgrounds then made for his lean-to laundry to wash up. After cleaning his face and the back of his neck he grabbed a few bottles of homebrewed beer, his three new kegel pins and set off in a scurry along a path of wild oats William had laid flat.
    Arthur had turned over his property, not entirely forsaking his vines, to cut flowers: lisianthus, carnations, wallflowers, calendulas and in summer, endless fields of sunflowers. Everybody thought he was loopy, although William knew he was making money packing them off to Adelaide twice a week. Department stores, florists and the odd fruit shop had come over to his way of thinking: where others had started making plastic azaleas, he would make a killing with the real thing.
    Arthur was a confirmed bachelor, the only child of parents who’d smothered him with love then demanded he go out to find a bride. He’d brought a few girls home to meet them and they’d quickly sized them up, dismissing them as entirely inadequate. Arthur, who was more interested in his woodwork and flowers anyway, was happy to let a future of nagging and baby vomit pass him by.
    He called after William but saw that his friend was caught up in the cries of a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos come to feed on the soft female cones of a native pine.
    William arrived at the Kegelbahn and put his jacket on the back of a chair. He deposited his few drinks and wurst and said to Julius Rechner,